The primitive communes persisted for tens of thousands of years. They were self-contained, their productivity changed very little, and from a low base. There was little dynamic within them, to create any contradiction between the productive and distribution relations. But, eventually, such contradictions did arise, and the communes dissolved, and class societies took their place, complete with states to enforce the new distribution relations. The same was true of the AMP. In those societies, it was not social revolutions that took place, but periodic changes only in the ruling dynasty. If any social revolution took place, it was the consequence of external conquest, or involvement, as with the British colonisation of India.
Feudalism arises in conditions of, already, more developed means of communication, and, consequently, in a world less confined and parochial than that which preceded it. It expands across Europe, in just centuries, compared to the millennia in which the previous modes of production developed. But, that, in itself, hastens the sharpening of the contradictions within it, and its ultimate demise. Starting around 1,000 A.D., it, already, bore within it the seeds of its own destruction, in the form of commodity production and exchange, which, by the fifteenth century, had given rise to capitalist production in the towns, creating the urban bourgeoisie, which was to become the new capitalist ruing class.
Again, within the space of just three centuries, this industrial capitalism was to become the dominant mode of production, in Britain, during the Industrial Revolution. But, within just a century and a half, the contradictions within it led to a new social revolution, as the productive relations burst out of the fetters of the monopoly of private capital. Socialised capital, in the form of cooperatives and corporations (joint stock companies) expropriated private capital, with the capitalist ruling class, itself, being expelled from their social function in production, and reduced to the role of simply money-lenders, coupon clippers and speculators. Yet, just as with every previous such transition, they remained the ruling-class and retained control of the state, which ensured the previous distribution relations continued. But, that simply becomes a fetter on the further development of the means of production, sharpening the contradiction to the point at which a rupture must occur.
“... the more mobile a given mode of production and exchange, the more capable it is of expansion and development, the more rapidly does distribution reach the stage at which it outgrows its progenitor, and in which it comes into conflict with the hitherto prevailing mode of production and exchange. The old primitive communities which have already been mentioned could remain in existence for thousands of years—as in India and among the Slavs up to the present day—before intercourse with the external world gave rise to the internal inequalities of property as a result of which they began to break up. On the other hand, modern capitalist production, which is hardly three hundred years old and has become predominant only since the introduction of large-scale industry, that is, only in the last hundred years, has in this short time brought about antagonisms in distribution—concentration of capital in a few hands on the one side and concentration of the propertyless masses in the big towns on the other—which must of necessity bring about its downfall.” (p 189-90)
The connection between the productive relations and distribution, in all modes of production, is so symbiotic that, even without a scientific understanding of it, it finds expression in the realm of ideas, and popular culture, but in a refracted manner. It takes the form of a sense of justice or injustice, i.e. it is presented in terms of morality. Hence, the concept that slavery is morally reprehensible, only arises when slavery itself is in the process of dissolution. That is true of slavery in the Southern US states, as well as in the ancient slave societies, and, also, as with serfdom.
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