A parallel between that and today can be made, in that, today's global ruling class of speculators and coupon-clippers, have little scope to spend their increasing wealth, from interest/dividends/rents, other than on an ever more extravagant conspicuous consumption, for example, their own space craft, and a continual feeding back of that wealth into the purchase of financial and property assets that drives those prices ever higher. Their only other option is to revert to becoming private owners of industrial capital, which some have sought to do, but that has limited scope too, in the era of socialised capital and imperialism. Moreover, any actual investment in real industrial capital, as opposed to simply the purchase of existing shares/bonds/property, i.e. speculation, means an expansion of the real economy, and demand for labour raising relative wages and squeeze on profits, and, also, a consequent increase in the demand for money-capital, causing interest rates to rise, and so reducing asset prices, which is what the ruling class seeks to avoid.
The fact that the Pharaohs and other such dynasties, for example, in China and India engaged in this conspicuous consumption, however, did have other consequences. To meet their consumption needs, it meant that skilled craftsmen developed in producing jewellery etc. It also developed architecture and construction, and along with it mathematics. Similarly, when the feudal aristocracy began to have the potential to buy an increasing range of exotic commodities, as the Americas and East Indies were opened up by merchant adventurers, it meant that they bought these new commodities with money, driving a shift in the payment of feudal rent from Labour Rent to Rent in Kind, to Money Rent and taxes, which drives a shift, also, to the production of commodities, sold for money, in order to pay these money rents and taxes.
A similar development to the AMP occurred in South America. But, in North America, with large open spaces, and sparse populations, the material conditions favoured a continuation of societies based on hunting and gathering. The same was true in Australia. In Western and Northern Europe, neither weather conditions nor soil conditions were as favourable as in the Nile Delta or Mesopotamia. For a long time, hunting and gathering continued to dominate, but the weather conditions did not require the same focus on large civil engineering works that formed the basis of the AMP. For many societies, the mode of production was based on pillage, as with the Vikings.
None of these modes of production arise as a consequence of acts of conscious will, but evolve, purposively, as a consequence of societies adapting to the specific conditions in which they exist. Of course, the very act of producing, itself, changes those material conditions.
“The conditions under which men produce and exchange vary from country to country, and within each country again from generation to generation. Political economy, therefore, cannot be the same for all countries and for all historical epochs. A tremendous distance separates the bow and arrow, the stone knife and the exceptional occurrence of exchange transactions among savages from the steam-engine of a thousand horse power, the mechanical loom, the railways and the Bank of England. The inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego have not attained mass production and world trade, any more than they have bill-jobbing or a Stock Exchange crash. Anyone who attempted to bring the political economy of Tierra del Fuego under the same laws as are operative in present-day England would obviously produce nothing but the most banal commonplaces.” (p 186-7)
Duhring, of course, did want to reduce everything to the same set of absolute laws, relevant to all societies, everywhere in the universe, and for eternity. Bourgeois ideology proceeds on a similar basis. How many TV programmes do you see in which ancient Roman society, for example, is reduced to the same kind of class and productive relations of capital and labour we have today, other than simply less advanced or developed?
I remember as an undergraduate being in a politics tutorial with the late Margaret Canovan, who asked us what the main difference was between feudalism and capitalism. I, of course, replied that feudalism was based on direct production, whereas capitalism was based on generalised commodity production and exchange. You can imagine my astonishment, and that of another Marxist in the tutorial, then, when Dr. Canovan responded by saying that this was preposterous, or words to that effect. After the tutorial, myself and the other Marxist comrade went to speak to our Economics Professor, the late Les Fishman, and put the same question to him, asking whether capitalism was so distinguished, to which, of course, as a Marxist, himself, he concurred.
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