If we consider social organisms, we can see, as Engels describes in The Origin of The Family, Private Property and The State, the material conditions – rise in social productivity – that bring about the dissolution of the primitive commune and metamorphosis into class society. It is not that the class society arises alongside it, or within its interstices. Rising social productivity makes possible a social surplus, A social surplus means that some in society need not labour. It is the foundation of class society, as a division into labourers and exploiters of that labour, of rulers and ruled.
If we look at different types of class society, however, we see a different process, more akin to evolution of different species than to metamorphosis of a given species through its lifecycle. When the primitive commune dissolved and private property arises, this private property takes the form of means of production, primarily the ownership of land, but, in slave societies, also, of slaves. As Barrington Moore Junior describes, even in societies based on the AMP, where a bureaucratic-collectivist ruling caste arises, there is still a class of private landlords and often slave owners.
Slave-owning societies always existed alongside the private ownership of land, and the existence of a large class of peasants, who were neither slaves nor owners of slaves. Slave society does not metamorphose into feudal society, but is replaced by it, as better adapted to material conditions.
Just as slave-owning societies, such as ancient Greece and Rome, as well as societies based on the AMP, such as Egypt, India, and China contained within them private landowners and peasants, so feudal society based on private land owners contains within it, also, the ownership of slaves/serfs, as well as a large class of peasants. This feudal society, based on this private ownership of land leads to a metamorphosis into a more developed form, but it is not capitalism. In every society, including the primitive commune, there arises commodity production and exchange, as Marx and Engels describe. Each commune begins to produce commodities that it exchanges with other communes. In order to conduct this trade, the communes appoint representatives who become the basis of a class of merchants.
So, even whilst societies continue to be based on direct production, be they slave societies, feudal societies, or the AMP, there is always trade and commodity production and exchange, and there are always merchants, and their merchant capital. Because money arises naturally from such commodity production and exchange, as a means of indirectly measuring value, and then of circulation, there also arises, in each of these societies, money lending capitalists. These are what Marx calls antediluvian forms of capital.
Feudal society exists on the basis of the extraction of rent from land ownership – unequal exchange. Its mature metamorphosed form, then, becomes colonialism, the acquisition of land across the globe. The means for achieving this becomes a symbiotic relation between the landowners, and the merchant and money-lending capitalists. In other words, Mercantilism. But, as Marx sets out, this mercantilism itself represents an obstacle in the path of the development of a new social organism in the shape of capitalist society. Rent, interest, and merchant profits represent a deduction from industrial profit. It was based upon unequal exchange, protectionism and monopoly.
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