Duhring's proposition that all property is the result of, and rests upon force is a version of Proudhon's mantra that “all property is theft”. The reality is that, in order to obtain superior force, a previous development of property, and its accumulation in the hands of a section of society is required first.
“How did this property come into existence? In any case it is clear that it may have been robbed, and therefore may be based on force, but that this is by no means necessary. It may have been obtained by labour, by theft, by trade or by fraud. Nevertheless, it must have been obtained by labour before there was any possibility of its being robbed.” (p 205-6)
In the Old Testament story of Joseph, he advised the Pharaoh to store food during the seven years of plenty. When the seven lean years came, he was able to supply the other peasant producers with food, but, first, in exchange for their children being taken into servitude, then their wives, and eventually themselves.
“Private property by no means makes its appearance in history as the result of robbery or force. On the contrary. It already existed, though limited to certain objects, in the ancient primitive communes of all civilised peoples. It developed into the form of commodities already within these communes, at first through barter with foreigners. The more the products of the commune assumed the commodity form, that is, the less they were produced for the producers' own use and the more for the purpose of exchange, and the more the original natural division of labour was supplanted by exchange within the commune as well, the more unequal became the property status of the individual commune members, the more deeply was the ancient common ownership of the land undermined, and the more rapidly did the commune move towards its dissolution and transformation into a village of smallholding peasants.” (p 206)
Engels describes this process in “The Origin of The Family, Private Property and The State”.
In Native American tribes, as with Celtic clans, chiefs and chieftains arise, not on the basis of force, but on the back of common ownership and voluntary agreement. The chiefs are usually those that distinguish themselves in battle with other tribes, just as the Medicine Men, and other religious leaders establish themselves on the basis of some supposed secret knowledge, and connection to the spirit world. That may arise from some actual knowledge of the medicinal properties of plants, or knowledge of the stars, seasons and so on, or, simply, as a result of guile and trickery. Either way, it is not force, and, again, requires the existence of a social surplus. As Marx sets out, in Capital III, it is this social surplus, originally paid as tribute to these leaders, that consolidates into an entitlement based purely on rank, status and tradition. It forms the basis of feudal rent, tithes and taxes.
“For thousands of years Oriental despotism and the changing rule of conquering nomad peoples were unable to injure these old communities; the gradual destruction of their primitive home industry by the competition of products of large-scale industry brought them nearer and nearer to dissolution. Force was as little involved in this process as in the dividing up of the land held in common by the village communities [Gehöferschaften] on the Moselle and in the Hochwald, which is still taking place today; the peasants simply find it to their advantage that the private ownership of land should take the place of common ownership.” (p 206)
Marx makes the same point in relation to the role of Britain in India.
“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.”
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