But, previous modes of production were always constrained in how they were able to utilise this social surplus so as to develop production at a more rapid pace. Capitalism, by contrast, is founded upon the principle of utilising this social surplus precisely for the purpose of revolutionising production, of production for the sake of production, which itself is a fundamentally progressive factor.
“To assert, as sentimental opponents of Ricardo’s did, that production as such is not the object, is to forget that production for its own sake means nothing but the development of human productive forces, in other words the development of the richness of human nature as an end in itself. To oppose the welfare of the individual to this end, as Sismondi does, is to assert that the development of the species must be arrested in order to safeguard the welfare of the individual, so that, for instance, no war may be waged in which at all events some individuals perish.”
Capitalism then is the most progressive mode of production, because it revolutionises production at a far more rapid pace than all previous modes of production, and raises the level of the productive forces to a far higher level.
“The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?”
The slave societies of ancient Greece and Rome, and of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and Persia were able to build up huge social surpluses, and to develop, science, art and culture, but the foundation of the economy, for the majority, remained individual peasant agriculture that continued in the same methods for millennia. The huge social surpluses were used not only to finance the retainers, philosophers, and artisans that developed all of the hallmarks of civilisation that these societies produced, but also simply to hoard huge amounts of treasure, to build pyramids, and, of course, to establish huge armies so as to create empires. They created the science and technology that was capable of producing the kinds of means of production that could revolutionise production – the science behind the steam engine, i.e. the expansive power of steam, was known to the Romans, for example – but the mode of production had no objective reason, nor means, of developing such technologies as capital, because capital, in such societies, could only exist in its antediluvian forms of usurers capital and merchant capital.
The same was true of the Asiatic Mode of Production in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China etc. Both slave society, and the AMP were historical dead-ends. The destruction of slave societies did not result in the rise of a new dominant social class, and new mode of production, but, as Marx and Engels say in The Communist Manifesto, “the common ruin of the contending classes”. Under the AMP, the methods of production remained the same for millennia, and the same social structure was frozen in aspic, held in place with a myriad social taboos, and laws that maintained their strict caste systems. Periodically, the personnel of the ruling caste would be flung from power, but only to be replaced by a different set of personnel, whilst the foundations of the system remained unchanged. It was incapable of further development, and change could only come out of its destruction, a destruction which came from outside in the form of colonialism. As Marx says in relation to India, the introduction of British colonialism was the first social revolution the country had ever seen.
“I share not the opinion of those who believe in a golden age of Hindostan...
All the civil wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests, famines, strangely complex, rapid, and destructive as the successive action in Hindostan may appear, did not go deeper than its surface. England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing. This loss of his old world, with no gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindoo, and separates Hindostan, ruled by Britain, from all its ancient traditions, and from the whole of its past history....
These two circumstances – the Hindoo, on the one hand, leaving, like all Oriental peoples, to the Central Government the care of the great public works, the prime condition of his agriculture and commerce, dispersed, on the other hand, over the surface of the country, and agglomerated in small centres by the domestic union of agricultural and manufacturing pursuits – these two circumstances had brought about, since the remotest times, a social system of particular features – the so-called village system, which gave to each of these small unions their independent organisation and distinct life...
These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.”
And, again illustrating his scientific method, devoid of any morals or moralising, Marx distinguishes between the immediate human consequences of such action, and the objectively progressive, nature of it.
“Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organisations disorganised and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilisation, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalising worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.
England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.”
(ibid)
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