Marx gives several examples of this. The Mongols were cattle-breeders, which required large tracts of land, and that was manifest in their conquest of Russia. When the Goths overran the Roman Empire, they found the fact that it had already uprooted the old peasant production, and created large landed estates, fitted well with their own mode of production, based on agriculture, using serfs, who were scattered across the countryside, and so could be adapted to their needs. Marx notes that plunder has been cited as one means by which conquering nations have operated, but, to plunder its necessary that something has been previously produced.
“Moreover, the manner of plunder depends itself on the manner of production, e.g., a stock-jobbing nation cannot be robbed in the same way as a nation of cowherds.” (p 203)
It may occur in the form of abducting slaves, but, as previously described, for slavery to exist, its necessary that social productivity is at a level whereby the slave can produce more than required for their own subsistence. As Engels notes, in many primitive societies, where such abductions took place, it was often not to obtain slaves, but to supplement the members of the tribe, to ensure its continuance. And, slavery is a very ineffectual mode of production, compared with others, so that it is only in limited spheres where slaves can then be used, as slaves, in some other society.
“or (as in South America, etc.) a mode of production appropriate to slave-labour has to be evolved.” (p 203)
Similarly, laws may be enacted that attempt to determine the distribution of factors of production, and so ensure a continuation of a given mode of production, but these cannot, in the end, prevent the playing out of social laws. The laws of primogeniture were intended to ensure the continuation of feudal property. If inherited property was shared amongst the many children of aristocratic families, then large estates would quickly have been divided into small plots. Primogeniture ensures that landed property passed only to the eldest male heir, thereby, ensuring the continued concentration of land ownership.
However, once capitalist production commences, landlords begin to buy the expanded range of commodities on offer, and there is a general transfer of value from rural areas to the towns. To continue to finance consumption, the landlord borrows money, using land as collateral. Bit by bit, land itself becomes a commodity, as its sold off to pay debts. New bourgeois owners of this land arise, in the form of capitalist farmers. As the old feudal agriculture is unable to compete with it, so it becomes dissolved, and the old feudal production and land ownership with it.
But, similarly, when, for example, after the French Revolution, land reform is instituted, and the old aristocratic estates are broken up, and divided amongst the peasants, this cannot prevent the operation of the normal laws of bourgeois production, which brings about the renewed concentration and centralisation of production. As Marx describes in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, one means by which this occurred was that the peasants became indebted to banks, and so replaced the tribute previously paid to landlords, with tribute paid to banks in interest.
“Landed property tends to become concentrated again despite these laws.” (p 204)
And, this applies also to all of the reactionary policies of the petty-bourgeoisie, in trying to preserve small scale property (as Trotsky says the reflection also in their attempts to preserve the independence of small and weak states), and to hold back, and even break up large-scale capitals, via anti-trust laws, anti-monopoly alliances, and so on, just as with calls for large states to be broken up as with Brexit, or unified states to be turned into federal states, and even for such reactionary parochialism in demands for regionalism, devolution and so on.
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