Elsewhere, the rise in productivity meant that the old primitive communes began to dissolve, because a division of labour, also, meant that some families found a benefit of cultivating their own plot of land, and engaging in their own domestic production. They could add to their own family labour by taking in other labourers. A look at some of the old houses, preserved as museums, in Britain, shows the tables at which all these individuals would eat communally. As Lenin noted, in his analysis of this process, taking place in Russia in the 19th century, it was not even necessary for these additional workers to be exploited as wage-labourers, i.e. only paid the value of their labour-power, because the greater productivity of these households was enough to increase the surplus production.
“Production had developed so far that human labour-power could now produce more than was necessary for its maintenance; the means of maintaining additional units of labour-power were present; likewise the means of employing them; labour-power acquired a value. But the community itself and the association to which it belonged yielded no available, superfluous labour-power. On the other hand, the latter was furnished by war, and war was as old as the coexistence of several groups of juxtaposed communities. Hitherto, they had not known what to do with prisoners of war, and had therefore simply killed them; at a still earlier period, eaten them. But at the stage of the “economic order” which had now been attained, the prisoners acquired a value; they were therefore allowed to live and their labour made use of.” (p 230-1)
So, contrary to Duhring's argument that it is force, the domination of Man by Man, that leads to the creation of a surplus product, appropriated by the oppressor, the opposite is the case. No amount of force can produce a surplus. It was economic development and the creation, thereby, of surplus, as productivity rose, that enabled some in society to separate into a ruling class or caste. That they might, then, subsequently utilise that position, to also mobilise force, to maintain their position, is a different matter.
“Slavery had been invented. It soon became the dominant form of production among all peoples who were developing beyond the old community, but in the end it also became one of the chief causes of their decay. It was slavery that first made possible the division of labour between agriculture and industry on a larger scale, and with it the glory of the ancient world, Hellenism. Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science, without slavery, no Roman Empire. But without the basis laid by Hellenism and the Roman Empire, no modern Europe either. We should never forget that our whole economic, political and intellectual development presupposes a state of things in which slavery was as necessary as it was universally recognised. In this sense we are entitled to say: Without the slavery of antiquity no modern socialism.” (p 231)
Without slavery, the cultural development in Greece and Rome would not have happened, and so no development of the art and science upon which the modern world is built, including the concept of democracy. It was, of course, only the free citizens that took part in that ancient democracy, and they were able to do so, only because they were freed from the task of spending all day in labour to sustain themselves. Similarly, with liberal bourgeois democracy, it was only those that owned property that were given the vote, and even with social-democracy, it is only those with sufficient time and resources that can really engage fully in it, leaving the great mass with a superficial involvement every few years of going through the motions of putting a cross in a box against the names of parties all sharing a set of bourgeois or petit-bourgeois ideas.
“It is very easy to inveigh against slavery and the like in general terms and pour out the vials of one's lofty moral wrath on such infamies. Unfortunately all this conveys is merely what everyone knows, namely, that these institutions of antiquity are no longer in accord with our present conditions and our sentiments, which these conditions determine. But it does not tell us one word as to how these institutions arose, why they existed, and what role they played in history. When we examine these questions, we are compelled to say—however contradictory and heretical it may sound—that the introduction of slavery under the then prevailing conditions was a great step forward.” (p 231-2)
No comments:
Post a Comment