Proudhon arbitrarily assumes that all of history is driving towards this Nirvana of equality just as spirits, repeatedly reincarnated, progress, in each new life, to greater enlightenment.
“He imagines that the division of labour, credit, the workshop – all economic relations – were invented merely for the benefit of equality, and yet they always ended up by turning against it. Since history and the fiction of M. Proudhon contradict each other at every step, the latter concludes that there is a contradiction. If there is a contradiction, it exists only between his fixed idea and real movement.” (p 110-111)
As Marx says, this drive to equality appears as some act of Providence, driving history, and Proudhon includes a whole chapter on Providence.
Marx uses the example of The Highland Clearances to illustrate his point. Capitalist production begins in the towns in the 15th century, as the towns provided the minimum sized markets for commodities required to make capitalist production possible. In Britain, one of the first such industries to develop is textile production, which, at the time, was based on wool. As textile production expanded, in the towns, the demand for wool grew rapidly. Landowners, in Scotland, threw tenants (members of their own clans) off the land, and gave it over to sheep.
“This industry opened up new outlets for wool. In order to produce wool on a large scale, arable land had to be transformed into pasturage. To effect this transformation, the estates had to be concentrated. To concentrate the estates, small holdings had first to be abolished, thousands of tenants had to be driven from their native soil and a few shepherds in charge of millions of sheep to be installed in their place. Thus, by successive transformations, landed property in Scotland has resulted in the driving out of men by sheep. Now say that the providential aim of the institution of landed property in Scotland was to have men driven out by sheep, and you will have made providential history.” (p 111)
But, as set out previously, the concept of equality was not at all one that pervaded previous modes of production. Slavery assumes the very opposite, and The Bible assumes it as a normal state of affairs. Feudal society was based on institutionalised inequality. It is only the 19th century that really sees the concept of equality accepted as the norm, or to be striven for, and that was itself based upon the changes that capitalist production itself engenders. It drives towards an equality of all labour, via competition, to a single, universal labour, and equality of wages, for example, and, contrary to the views of Stalinists and Third Worldists, it does this via imperialism, on a global scale. As Trotsky put it,
“Capitalism finds various sections of mankind at different stages of development, each with its profound internal contradictions. The extreme diversity in the levels attained, and the extraordinary unevenness in the rate of development of the different sections of mankind during the various epochs, serve as the starting point of capitalism. Capitalism gains mastery only gradually over the inherited unevenness, breaking and altering it, employing therein its own means and methods. In contrast to the economic systems which preceded it, capitalism inherently and constantly aims at economic expansion, at the penetration of new territories, the surmounting of economic differences, the conversion of self-sufficient provincial and national economies into a system of financial interrelationships. Thereby it brings about their rapprochement and equalizes the economic and cultural levels of the most progressive and the most backward countries. Without this main process, it would be impossible to conceive of the relative levelling out, first, of Europe with Great Britain, and then, of America with Europe; the industrialization of the colonies, the diminishing gap between India and Great Britain, and all the consequences arising from the enumerated processes upon which is based not only the program of the Communist International but also its very existence.”
(The Third International After Lenin)
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