William Petty

Thomas Hobbes contributed some of the founding philosophical principals of political liberalism. William Petty (1623-87), a talented mathematician, was one of the first writers on economic questions to use mathematical analysis, and is credited with creating the first labor theory of value (in his Treatise on Taxes,1692). Together they were key founders of classical political economy (which is the basis of all the branches of modern bourgeois economics, from Keynesian to Neoliberal). Petty was the commoner son of a clothier, but advanced socially because of his brilliance as a student, which eventually led to a critical connection with a wealthy aristocrat (whose son he tutored), which eventuated in extensive European travel (with the son) and furthering his own education in Europe. Back in England, Petty eventually became personal secretary to Thomas Hobbes. The connection with Hobbes probably led to his appointment as physician with Cromwell’s occupying army in Ireland from 1652 to 1656. It was in Ireland that he earned fame and fortune, not as a physician, but as an economist. Here he employed his “political arithmetic,” to estimate the potential (exchange) value of expropriated Irish land.

Many Irish consider their country to be the first victim of English imperialism.  England’s commercial exploitation of Ireland dates from Henry VIII’s attempt to bring his Reformation and expropriations to Ireland, but only partly succeeding with the latter. Cromwell needed Irish land to distribute to veterans of his New Model Army in lieu of payment in cash, but, more generally, his plan was to turn Ireland into a profit-making plantation for liberal English gentlemen. Petty put his surveying and mathematical skills to work. For this he was rewarded with 30,000 expropriated acres and a noble title.  

What Petty learned in Ireland he applied in England for estimating the value of nation’s productive property, especially property in land. His labor theory of value was developed as a method for determining the rate of profit for productive assets, beginning with land, so that taxes could be assessed more scientifically. Returning to our simple representation of the fundamentals of capitalism: M--P--M’--Petty centered on “P” production, because capitalist plantation owners had taken control of the production process out of the hands of peasants and artisans in overturning the feudal order. In Petty’s formulation, “P” stands for the means of production: land, labor, tools, buildings, etc. --or in terms of “political arithmetic,” not the physical assets themselves but their exchange value: their cost to the  new, rational, mathematically minded capitalist who (himself or his agents) directs the production process for the purpose of profit-making.

Petty separated the means of production (P) into two economic categories: “labor stock,” and “asset stock”. “Labor stock” is key to Petty’s labor theory of value. It doesn’t represent an actual human being, but an abstract, monetary value: the capital cost for satisfying the basic needs of the workers one employs during a production cycle. For Petty, given 17 century economic conditions, “labor stock” could represent the cost to the employer of slaves producing goods on American plantations, wage earning peasants on English commercial farms, cottage artisans doing piece work for merchants, or uprooted artisans, paid by the piece, or paid wages in large manufacturing operations. “Asset stock” represent all means of production other than “labor stock,” and like labor stock does not represent the actual material assets--land, raw materials, tools, buildings, etc. It represents to cost to the projector/capitalist of those material assets. Simply put: in the formula, M--P--M’, “P” (the capital invested in the production process: M for labor costs + asset stock) should result in the production of products whose value when sold on the market should be M’: products that when sold bring in more money, or profit, than the cost of producing them. Petty was a practicing projector and made no bones of how profit was actually made: one bought labor to produce “excess products,” the value of which was more than the cost to keep labor working and producing more and more profit, day after day. 

 Another important category is Petty’s concept of “natural rent,” which reflects the  potential productivity of a parcel of land relative to the application of labor stock . Rent is a percentage of the value of the “excess” product (profit) that a capitalist/renter pays to his landlord. The better the quality of land, the more goods it can produce per worker, the higher the rent, and vice versa. Rent for a building follows a similar logic (percentage of the market value of the structure). The same political arithmetic for calculating costs and profit can be applied to the merchant capitalist who organizes skilled labor under one roof for piece-work in the production of cloth or wagons: profit represents the difference between the manufacturer’s costs for labor stock and asset stock (and perhaps rent for the building and interest on a loan to initiate the operation) and the monetary value of the product(s) he sells on the market. 

Petty’s value equation for a particular productive (profit-making enterprise) might look like this: V (or Exchange value of the commodity produced)=labor stock (cost of labor)+asset stock (cost of all other means of production, including rent and interest costs)+excess product* (profit). 

[*either relative to the cost of labor stock to make a single product or the excess products in a batch of goods]

 Petty estimated that England’s national income (gross domestic product in our terms) of his day amounted to about 667 million pounds, 417 million pounds of which was made up of labor stock and asset stock costs. That left 250 million pounds of taxable income for the state. 

What makes Petty’s “political arithmetic” a labor theory of value is that the labor which the capitalist buys as “labor stock” can be shown to produce all wealth: “asset stock” in the form of labor-prepared land and raw materials, buildings and  tools, etc., as well as the “excess product” which the capitalist transforms into profit by sale on the market. Labor stock in the person of the actual laborer can even be shown to produce and reproduce itself because some of the profit from the “excess product” (which the laborer produces) the capitalist invests as a cost (M) to sustain the actual human labor force he needs to produce more “excess product” (profit or M’). Even interest and rent can be shown to be merely that portion of the excess product that landlords and bankers appropriate from producing capitalists (who appropriate it from labor) by dint of their monopoly in land or money. 

Petty, however, was not Marx, but a gentleman theorist of his own time and class. He was far from friendly to labor as such. True, he concedes that human labor as such is the source of all wealth. That was a common, ideal (physiocratic) assumption of the time. But for the capitalist projector, the point of production is not to produce wealth (useful things), it’s to make money (profit) on one’s investment in “labor stock” and “asset stock”, free or slave. Aristotle, himself, limited by the slave-holding (“democratic”) conditions of this own day, viewed the slave as “while being human by nature is not his own but of someone else” ...a “talking tool.” Likewise, Petty viewed both slave and wage worker, not as their own, but as capital belonging to the capitalist (the latter only during the period of his employment). Workers as such, living, productive human beings existing outside the capital relation which renders him or her “labor stock” (given the ongoing ravages of primal accumulation) were worth little, or actually worth nothing. The conclusion is inevitable: capitalists, owners of labor stock, not human labor as such, are the creators of wealth. 

                                                        

John Locke

Petty’s transformation of the physical worker into a marginal utility (to use Keynes’ term) of an investor’s capital was utilized by John Locke, to make tyranny and injustice seem liberating and just, when he famously and disingenuously proclaimed that land belonged only to those who “worked the land”--this not in defense of the actual workers of his day who were being forcibly removed from their occupation of threatened common lands--but in defense of land-grabbing “projectors” like Petty and Locke himself, whose troops were uprooting them. Locke’s declaration is a casuistical nail driven into the coffin of vestigial feudal (land possession and village habitation) rights and a declaration of bourgeois independence from feudal right by capitalists who legally seized land that happened to be occupied by peasants who worked it for their own subsistence rather than profit. Such land (usually common lands or land held without proper title by small producers) was considered by the new mathematically minded elite “unproductive” (of profit) and therefore “desert”. In other words, the owners of capital, who employed their labor stock to make the land productive (of profit)--not those who who sustained themselves by their own labor, had the right to own it. Similar political arithmetic was (and still is) used to justify the “legal”, violent dispossession of native populations globally to make room for capital. 

Locke inspired Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and is the ideological father of “Liberty”, the US Constitution, and parliamentary democracy. He was also the father of the Virginia Colony’s slave laws, which served to legitimate the chains that bound Thomas Jefferson’s African “labor stock,” giving owners not so humane as our third president the liberty to put such property to death if necessary in pursuit of profit. In the Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes defined “honor” “as  “power” based on wealth. In his “Second Treatise on Government (1689),” his former student, John Locke, put the same idea this way: “the great and chief end of men who come together to form a government....is the preservation of their property”. 

The 18th century was the age of satire in Europe--usually aimed at the dull-witted hypocrisy and rapaciousness of the rising bourgeoisie. Jonathan Swift might have had “projectors” like Locke or Petty in mind when he assumed the persona of an unctuous English gentleman-projector and humbly proposed, in A Modest Proposal (1729), a project whereby uprooted, starving Irish women might be encouraged to make labor stock of their unprofitable, brat-producing (desert) bodies and produce children as “excess product” (profit) for the refined tables and jolly hunts of thoughtful, well meaning liberal capitalists like himself. Today, the human rights face of the neoliberal empire is similarly modest in proposing market based solutions for lifting capitalism’s victims out of poverty: selling themselves and/or their children into the tourist industry; becoming indebted entrepreneurial street cooks and artisans; marketing valuable parts of their bodies; offering as commodities their ethnic provenance and language skills to occupiers or their outrage to saudiemiratesforempire@cia.org

Locke and Aristotle can and should be critiqued for representing their own class interests, but the critique and the critic exist because of the social and intellectual space, that earlier thinkers like them helped to clear of reactionary ideas and institutions that themselves had once served to bring human consciousness and institutions out of an even earlier darkness. The evolution of political/class consciousness is driven by human need to overcome the resistance of the beneficiaries of the hierarchal institutions (social and intellectual) we create and continue to create in our disunited struggles against extinction and freedom from necessity.  

labor theory of value

                                  

                                   The Labor Theory of Value

                                                         

1. Definitions

Any attempt to explicate Marx’s labor theory of value, must begin with definitions of three key terms: wealth, value, money. The definition of these terms, like the definitions of all socially generated concepts, must be defined within their historical/material context. The same goes for the labor theory of value itself, which is the product of a dialectical critique of “political economy”.  Before moving on to Marx’s theory, “political economy” must also be defined in relation to the historical experience that encouraged its invention. In that regard I’ll present a brief discussion of the relevant ideas of the fathers of English political economy: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, William Petty, Adam Smith, and David Ricardo. Then I’‘ll conclude with Marx’s labor theory of value. Human beings are more or less conscious, living histories of the human social experience.

                                                                                                                          

Abundance of good things like fruit and nuts does not make for a wealthy monkey. Wealth consists of the products of social labor which satisfy the basic and socially necessary needs of human beings. “Value” is a measure of wealth. There are two kinds: use value and exchange value. Use value is the measure of wealth as such: the degree by which particular products of human labor are useful in satisfying a particular individual and/or societal need. Exchange value is an abstract notion of equivalence assigned to products that are exchanged for one another. It arises only under conditions of exchange of such products. Prior to the establishment of societies dominated by the capitalist system of production, production of wealth was intended for use by the community of producers. Among pre-capitalist societies surplus products were sometimes exchanged. Then some notion of equivalence (probably relative to effort required in the production or transport of a product), would come into consideration.  But such trade--even under patriarchal hierarchies like feudal societies, where the lord garnished the surplus product of his villages for his own consumption and/or for trade with merchants--was conducted in goods which were primarily produced for use, not exchange. 

Once money relations began to penetrate pre-capitalist society in late medieval Europe, resulting in land privatizations and peasant/artisan loss of control of what was produced, increasing proportions of agricultural based goods were produced for their exchange value, as measured monetarily on the "market, rather than for use and local consumption. From the point of view of those, proto-industrial, profit-seeking landowning aristocrats, merchants, and bankers who organized uprooted peasants and artisans to produce goods in privatized village cottages of larger workshops in the towns, it was the exchange value of these goods, not their use value that mattered. All human beings can get along perfectly well in satisfying their needs with useful products, even capitalist human beings. But, as contrasted with pre-capitalist elites who valued the labor they exploited for the use values that they created, and which they consumed, capitalists as such, thrive and live on the exchange value of the products that the employees produce--that is to say, on their monetary equivalent and something extra--profit---when the products are sold on the market. The capitalist mode of production grows out of pre-existing market relations, but begins and ends with money. Money is invested in the means of production, including labor;-products are produced, and then sold for more than the original investment, profit. To put it another way, capitalists own the means of production, including workers during the working day, and if workers employing those means cannot produce enough products that when sold will cover the cost in labor and material for producing them--plus sufficient profit--capitalists will not begin production, or they will stop producing if once begun. A marxist cultural philosopher once pointed out that unemployment is the essential product of the capitalism mode of production.  

Money as a measure of exchange value existed before capitalism and was necessary for its development. As human society evolved and trade expanded, certain especially desirable commodities were hoarded by early professional traders because they could be exchanged in certain portions for any other commodity in a particular region.  From ancient times, “commodity money” (salt, gold, beads, silver, etc.) in a given region was employed as a standard for measuring equivalency between goods being traded. For example in a given trading area, according to the relative need and scarcity of a range of products, a pound of salt might exchange for one shirt, or 1/10th of a good knife (requiring 10 pounds of salt), or four pounds of potatoes, etc.). Commodity money--the basis of all monetary forms--is simply a product of human labor that comes to be socially recognized in a trading region as possessing certain characteristics that rendered them exchangeable for all goods produced in a given trading region: it had to be desirable everywhere, so that a seller would accept it in exchange for his or her particular product because it could be exchanged for other useful goods that he or she might need; it had to be scarce (relatively hard to come by); it had to be frangible (capable of fragmentation without loss of its essential, desirable characteristics).  

With the coming into being of patriarchal hierarchies, governing powers tended to monopolize the process of breaking up commodity money (minting) into denominations relative to weight. Minting of frangible commodity money made it easily portable and speeded up the processes and spread of trade. In Western Europe, gold and silver became the main form of money by classical Greek and Roman times (600 B.C. to 200 B.C.).The English pound was actually a pound of sterling silver which could be broken up (according to weight) into pence, quid, etc. Huge amounts of gold and silver from the newly discovered Americas in the 15th century made this universally desirable form of commodity money relatively cheap, tremendously accelerating trade in Western Europe and around the world, giving European merchants a  comparative monetary advantage in global trade for empire building during the 16th and 17th centuries. 

The fundamentals of the two historical forms of capitalism (merchant and /finance/industrial) may both be represented diagrammatically as: M--P--M’. Or (M)oney is invested in a finished (P)roduct (merchant capital) or in the production of products (industrial capital) in order to make (M’)ore money than what was originally invested, or profit. In other words, the focus of capitalists as such is not on the use value of their products, but on money: the amount invested in producing goods and the larger amount of money returned to the capitalist after the product is sold on the market. Money (paper, financial instruments, or some form of the commodity money) is the measure and store of the exchange value of capitalism's "commodities":  goods that are produced not for use but primarily for exchange on the market. Therefore the final buyer of a commodity must (1) need or desire the commodity as a use value and more importantly (2) have money equivalent to the commodity's exchange value: equaling the money invested, plus something extra, or profit. Capitalists are driven by the profit motive to produce products for exchange on the market for the monetary, which they accumulate as money capital for re-investment and growth. Money is everything. Yet for the system to operate effectively, it has to produce use values…for consumers who need them and have the money ("effective demand") to buy them. In mature capitalism those effectively demanding consumers of use value are mostly wage earners, whose earnings must be kept low enough for the capitalist enterprise to remain profitable. And there's the rub. 

A brief history of liberal political economy

 Thomas Hobbes

During the 16th century, merchants and bankers had succeeded in breaking through feudal barriers, commercializing much of the land (for plantation agriculture, commercial logging, and mining) and breaking the hold of city guilds in the manufacture of goods, all the while establishing themselves as creditor/treasurers of the Tudor court and partnering with well placed courtiers like Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh in merchant adventurer colonial/piratical enterprises. This symbiotic relationship between merchant/bankers and the Tudor state became problematic after the death of Elizabeth 1 in 1603.

 During the first half of the 17th century, England was embroiled in a struggle for control of the state between the weakened landed aristocracy and the ascendant merchant/merchant banker class. The bourgeois class had outgrown the cosy, semi-feudal arrangement under the Tudors. They had grown richer than kings and courtiers, but lacked real control of the state. The rule of the Scottish King James VI, as James 1 of England (1603-1625), inaugurated a period of intrigues and murderous plots within the court cabal--actual Jacobean dramas which Shakespeare and other dramatists imaginatively transported to distant times and places. James 1 died in 1625. He was succeeded by his son, Charles 1, whose troubled rule eventuated in a civil war and his execution in 1649 by the victorious forces of the Parliamentary party that represented the interests of landowning, commercially oriented aristocrats of the robe and of more ancient lineage, wealthy merchants and bankers, proprietors of large merchant/banker-organized “factories”, ship owners and their warehousing “factors”, absentee owners of colonial plantations, and well connected professionals serving the interests of all the above--all frustrated by the vestigial feudal privileges of conservative great lords and their dependents: merchant/bankers connected to such lords, entrenched gentlemen-courtiers who took advantage of their privileged access to powerful positions in the state bureaucracy to enrich themselves (bribes, taxes), at the expense of the enterprising bourgeoisie. 

England’s civil wars (its “Bloody Revolution,1642-51),” were the culmination of a process of transforming feudal right to land and governance to bourgeois right to land and governance. The question of legitimacy regarding the right to occupy and use land was critical because land was the basic source for the production of wealth before the advent of industrial capitalism. Feudally, land was not “owned” by the occupying noble but was held in fealty to a superior lord in a corporate hierarchy crowned by a king, whose own right to his realm was sanctioned by God. On the other hand, bourgeois property right was developed by non-land owning (except in the large, chartered towns) merchant capitalists trading goods. Ownership of such goods and other personal property was vested in the individual by contract involving the exchange of money. Economically, this process of making a commodity of the land had been evolving situationally (but with legal ambiguity) for centuries before the civil wars broke out.  

For example, it was common that the bourgeois gentlemen, rather than swearing fealty to the noble lord, bought his land under some sort of agreement that stipulated a yearly fealty fee, which served to legitimize his occupation and use of the land, but also served to remind the new “owner” of the precariousness of his possession. Similarly, there remained the customary right of nobles to high office in the state. The killing of the king and the taking over of the state by the Parliament party pretty much took care of that customary right. But there remained the critical need to create laws justifying and protecting bourgeois property rights, and an even greater need to theorize and legitimize the revolutionary state, which, in killing the King, had, in effect, deprived itself of the sanctioning power of God. The new science of political economy came to the rescue.

 During the 17th century, a scientific revolution was taking place in Europe, challenging the power of religious dogma to sanction truth with the sanctioning power of scientific “truths” drawn from the study of “Nature”. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), historian, physicist, political theorist, one-time student of Sir Francis Bacon (and his method of reasoning inductively from observed experience) returned to England from France when the issue of the civil wars was settled, and served as secretary to the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. In his Leviathan (1651), Hobbes based the sanctioning (“honor”) of the state, not on divine sanction, but on its power to create and maintain order. For Hobbes, power is its own justification and deserves men’s “honor” (submission). Hobbes based this stance on his definition of Human nature, which he postulated as fundamentally selfish, competitive, acquisitive, and violent. Under natural conditions of equality, he reasoned, mankind lives in a state of “war of all against all.” Life is “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short”. For Hobbes, given his assumptions regarding the barbarism of natural man, any kind of state was better than egalitarian anarchy. Hobbes' reputation as a key founder of political liberalism derives from his theory of the social contract. Here sensible men agree to relinquish some of their liberties to the sovereign power of the state, which secures their lives and their property.  Hobbes doesn’t fill in the gap between natural man and the sensible ones among them who come to own property and make social contracts.

The contradiction between Hobbes’ scientific, empirical approach to physical phenomena and his representation of social phenomena in non-empriical, archetypal form (i.e. the representation of mankind in a state of natural equality, and the gentlemen who form the social contract) is problematical. An empirical approach to either would require some sort of historical contextualization. In terms of the historically created social contract with which he was familiar, the contractors--wealthy merchants and landowners who had the good sense to come together to form the new state--were only a tiny minority of those swept up in the civil wars (“war of all against all”). Cromwell’s New Model Army in itself included small farmers, artisans, and peasants, many of them "levelers" and Christian communists like Winstanley’s Diggers, who practiced equality between the sexes in communities set up commons they re-occupied. Latent hopes (reaching back to the peasant/artisan uprisings of the 14th century) among the common people for a better humanity had been reawakened in those unsettled times. Without these troops (and their hopes) there would have been no social contract which created the new elite to which Hobbes belonged--one which, as things turned out, liberated the peasant from feudal oppression...as well as from his vestigial feudal rights to the commons--while giving the venal, bourgeois landlords newly enshrined legal sanction to enclose common lands and forcibly, selfishly, acquisitively, remove those who believed that they they still had the right to occupy them. 

Many of those who came together to form the social contract must have actually resembled Hobbes’ primitive man, but dressed up sensibly, as economic man, their vices became virtues. Readers often misunderstand Hobbes. Man’s primitive brutishness is not the problem. But there is a problem when it is expressed under conditions of equality. 

As for Hobbes’ archetypal character structure of “mankind”--not to make invidious comparisons--it seems to exclude the female of the species. Hobbesian “man” is obviously and emphatically male, manifesting alienating characteristics, that while destructive of culture and enterprise, can be viewed positively. After all, competitiveness, acquisitiveness, and aggression ares valued traits in patriarchy’s pantheon, whether found in Achilles, Cromwell, or God Himself. In Hobbes, this archetypal structure of mankind is postulated dispassionately as “natural”. This view, however, is natural only to advocates of the liberal state and free market economics. For Hobbes, women as such could not be taken seriously in serious matters. Yet he feared them. For instance, Hobbes probably did not believe in witchcraft--but during a period of rabid persecution of women as witches throughout Europe, he publicly advocated the persecution and barbaric punishment of outspoken women as “witches”. Hobbes’s rational irrationality is characteristic of those defending hierarchy, whether based on the power of God or on reason and “natural” principles (i.e. male superiority, hierarchy based on ownership of property and money). 

Hobbesian “man” is simply a bourgeois version of the patriarchy’s ideal warrior, but in a business suit (silk hose and a wig in those days) when not in uniform--a hero, who, abstracted from the socializing influence of the female principle, must face alone--but for his possessions and the patriarchal god/state--the aggressions of his fellow, sexually and socially hollowed-out male competitors. Nationalism is the religion of the Hobbesian state, and a violent, but cowardly patriotism is the last refuge of such heroes: Oliver North, gun and dope runner, covert organizer of village massacres, plaintively intimating to everybody within ear shot that the “Old Man” (Ronald Reagan) “loves my ass” ; Henry Kissinger‘s basso profundo intimating in the glare of the media that political power (in his case, planning political assassinations and mass murder) is an “aphrodisiac”.

Kissinger won the Noble Peace Prize, as did our first Black president, Barak O’Bomber, who, teary-eyed, revealed, upon leaving office, that he believed in American exceptionalism  ...to the very [hollowed out] core of [his] being.... 

I have one more post to go on the labor theory of value. But I just sent off a letter to the editor of the London Review of Books on Terry Eagleton's  review of Edna O'Brien's The Little Red Chairs, which I'm posting here because I think that anti-communism is the demoralizing disease of what's left of the left in the West. LRB never publishes my letters because I'm not an academic or a professional writer, and because…well, that's obvious.

Terry Eagleton makes a categorical error in his review of Edna O’Brien’s The Little Red Chairs. It’s a common one made right and left by Western political writers. He places Stalin and Mao with Hitler in his moral category of “not strictly evil,” contrasting them to the “autotelic,” motivelessly malignant and therefore pure evil of O’brien’s character, Dr. Vlad. Neither Stalin nor Mao are characters in the book, but they help to establish Eagleton’s moral universe as a reviewer. So, in a way, they are off stage characters, like the one Eagleton slips into his review for reasons that remain ambiguous.This elusive character is named “the West”--which Eagleton acknowledges as having had a “high degree of responsibility” for the “political violence” that brought the evil Dr. Vlad, along with the other asylum-seekers, to Ireland, which O’brien depicts as a, corrupt neo-liberal playground. 

Eagleton allows “the West,” to slip on and off the stage in a prepositional phrase before placing him in a proper moral category, despite his “high degree of responsibility” for the “political violence”--morally neutral terms that easily slip off Eagleton’s tongue-- whereas, for Eagleton, the motiveless malignancy of Dr. Vlad “eludes presentation” and “beggars speech” (but not for “the courageous” O’Brien.) So the appearance of “the West” in Eagleton’s review is an abbreviated ambiguity that is somehow related to his understanding of the “speech-beggaring” evil Dr. Vlad perpetrates in Romantic Ireland.com’s corporate playground. Did Eagleton have to resort to fleeting euphemism in order (at least to pretend) to tell the whole truth? 

To be honest, I believe in political morality myself, and when someone glibly uses the term “the West” I think of Istvan Meszaros’ analysis of late capitalism’s "destructive production" stage, with its smug, but driven personifications going about their banal, self-validating business of violently commodifying everything--for example, manifested in austerity-ridden Romantic Ireland. com and in obscene, criminal wars that presumably “elude representation” for Eagleton but not for pop culture’s purveyors of pornographic violence (O’Brien’s portrayal of Dr. Vlad fornicating among the commodified Celts?).

It’s from this moral stance that I believe that Eagleton’s placement of Stalin and Mao with Hitler represents a categorical error. Germany--whether ruled by the self-styled “imperial socialists” of Weimar, or Hitler’s National Socialists, or Angela Merkel’s bankers--was and is of “the West” (ditto Japan). Hitler honestly claimed the same obscene, self-validating imperial rights for Germany in Poland and Russia (as did Japan in China) as the rest of “the West” practiced in the rest of the world. All appear to work ghoulishly together today.  

Whatever one thinks of them, both Stalin and Mao courageously opposed those obscene “rights.” They fought the thing itself, defensively. We should stand  unambiguously, but critically, for what they stood for. 

. 

            

Primitive Accumulation, part 4

                                                                 Primitive accumulation, part 4

In 1066, a French/Norman baron, William the Conqueror, invaded Saxon/Celtic England in response to a quarrel he had with a Capetian French king. He arrived with a band of noble followers and their dependents, as well as with merchants and artisans from his feudal holdings in Gascony. Once established, William began distributing the conquered lands as fiefs among his followers. Subduing the Saxon and Celtic kingdoms of England--as well as his own disgruntled barons--proved to be a lengthy process that continued long after William’s death. 

One of William’s (Plantagenet) descendants, John I, made a temporary peace with his rebellious aristocrats in 1215 by signing the Magna Carta, considered the founding document for the “freedom” of all English speaking people--but, in essence, establishing the liberty of elites to do what they pleased. In the Magna Carta king John pledged to honor the feudal liberties of his barons to rule over their fiefs and their subject populations vis a vis the crown. Neither the kings nor the aristocrats observed the letter of this famous document. In what follows, I’ll try to show how absolute monarchs and venal aristocrats joined with wealthy merchants to jointly exercise their liberty to control and exploit peasants and artisans by “freeing” their labor from the feudal bonds that allowed them direct access to the means of life, the initial step in the accumulation of potential wage laborers.

 The French connection of England’s Plantagenet kings involved them in feudal disputes  with French kings. These disputes culminated in Edward III going to war with the Artois King Phillip 4th over Edward’s weak claim to the French throne. The war turned out to be a long series of wars: the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). The Hundred Years war has been called first modern war, in the sense that battles weren’t between groups of knights, but involved the armies (largely conscripted peasants) of competing dynasties for the control of “France.” Entire countrysides were laid waste. Weapons of war had become more destructive and expensive. Contending kings and their nobles piled up huge debts to merchants who provided the exotic weaponry and the merchant bankers, who provided the credit. Kings and great barons responded by increasing taxes and tithes on peasants, artisans and the lesser nobility. Merchants were granted patents to farm these taxes, and were backed by soldiers.

The bubonic plague broke out in the mid-14th century, and killed perhaps one half of the population of Europe. Labor became scarce. That landlords had already begun enclosing some lands for commercial farming is indicated by the existence of an agricultural proletariat, for whom the “black death” meant higher wages for those who survived. In England, Ordinances and Statutes (1349-51) were issued by the King to bring down the price of labor and to make it a crime to refuse to work. Yet the price of labor continued to rise. Unable to hold on to their fleeing serfs, English lords took to enclosing open, common lands and using them to raise cattle and sheep for market. To raise money, feudal lords tried to sell recalcitrant peasants their personal freedom, or by offering money for converting feudal forms of land tenure to leaseholds. Ironically, higher wages and “freedom” from feudal bonds were important motivational forces in the process of primitive accumulation. Many serfs and free peasants chose working for wages over secure feudal land tenure arrangements that had become burdensome because of the increasing labor demands made on them by the indebted nobility. Eventually, however, wages came down to subsistence level and below. Tithes and taxes increased. 

The 14th century was marked by major peasant and artisan uprisings throughout Europe. Some of the more famous were:  Bruges and Ghent (1323-1328), the Jacquerie in France (1353), the Ciompi uprising in Florence and its suburbs (1378), and the Lollard risings throughout England, led by John Wycliff and John Ball (1381). All of these uprising were in response to immiseration related to war: devastation of land and villages, enclosures and other forms of privatization, and high rents, and taxes. All involved visionary communitarian ideology that rejected both the decaying feudal powers (of the aristocracy and the Church)--and the ascendancy of money relations, as exemplified in the monetary nature of the privatization of feudal lands and the higher taxes and rents for which money (rather than exchange in kind) was increasingly being demanded.

The Hundred Years War was almost immediately followed in England by the dynastic Wars of the Roses (1455-1487). The “red rose” Lancastrian victory over the “white rose” York side signaled the eventual demise of feudalism in England. “Absolute” monarchies in Europe, like Henry VII’s (1485-1509) tried to co-opt the leading aristocrats of the realm by offering  them privileged positions at the “Court” (i.e. the merchant capitalist backed monarchy) and the opportunity of becoming money rich as well as rich in land.  

During the reign of Henry VIII (1509-1547), the interpenetration of the “progressive,”  commercially-minded aristocracy and merchant capitalism began in earnest. Henry’s Protestant “reform” was chiefly the privatization of the vast holdings of the Catholic Church (1530) and their distribution, for a price, among the king’s noble and bourgeois favorites. Aristocrats invested in government granted monopolies trading commodities in Europe and the newly discovered Americas. Leading merchant banker families bought noble titles and the land that came with them. Things were being turned upside down, with money on top. 

 Meanwhile, in the countryside, the dismantling of the feudal order--the enclosure of lands (under newly minted private property laws drawn up in London), the tearing down of villages, the forcible evictions of inhabitants--to make way for profitable farming enterprises like raising sheep for wool--caused the narrator of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia  to exclaim that the sheep were eating men.

The first of the “Old Poor Laws” was passed under Henry VII in 1495. It criminalized the homelessness of the dispossessed, who were put in stocks and sent back to the parish from which they had been uprooted! After 1530, things got much worse. The Catholic church had provided the basic social services until its expropriation. Responsibility for indigent and homeless rural men, women, and children now fell on the almost non-existent resources of parish towns that were overwhelmed. Henry, who habitually cut the heads off of troublesome, principled advisors like Sir Thomas More and inconvenient wives like Ann Boylen, the mother of future queen Elizabeth, reacted to the social disaster he unleashed by issuing the Vagabond Act (1531,) which did not distinguish between vagrants and the unemployed, and replaced the stocks with the whipping post. The tortured, homeless victim was then returned the last “100”  from which he was probably uprooted and banished. (The term, 100, came from feudal times to designate a settlement of at least 100 cottages.)

Queen Elizabeth’s Poor Relief Act  (1601) established a land tax at the parish level throughout the land and attempted, somewhat humanely for the time, to address this new social problem of mass poverty. A new class in society was invented:  the “poor”. Different categories were created. The “deserving poor” were the old, the lame, etc., for whom the parish provided minimal food and shelter. The largest category was the “undeserving poor”: unemployed, able bodied men and women (and children) who were forced to do the sort of work (they were assumed to have disdained) in work houses that were really prisons: unpaid brute labor. Conditions in urban England’s dark, fetid warrens of destitution and crime were aggravated rather than improved by Elizabeth’s 1563 Statute of Artificers. All of the guilds of the major towns were consolidated under state governance, which set hours of work and maximum (not minimum) pay. Certain trades were reserved for the families of prosperous guild members. Guild masters were permitted to hire and fire “freedmen,” which is to say, refugees “freed from feudalism by privatizations in the countryside. Trades that came into existence after the time of the statute were outside its regulations. The effect was to break up the guild system by turning the wealthiest guild masters into capitalists, establishing distinctions and competition between waged workers and apprentices and journeymen, and establishing competition between the lesser guilds and merchant-organized producers. The Statute attracted precarious labor from the countryside to the cities, drove down wages, and increased the numbers of the unemployed, homeless, and desperate.  By the 17th century one could be condemned to death in England for stealing just about anything.  Very cruel public executions were a common form of state terror against this growing reserve army of cheap labor.

The 16th and 17th centuries featured the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, as well as the dynastic wars and social disturbances related to the transformation of feudal, personal relations to money-mediated social relations. These were also the centuries of hysterical state and church organized campaigns throughout Europe and the “New World” directed at “heretics”--most particularly women who were accused of being witches.  

Feminist scholar, Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch presents a well documented, persuasive argument that this terrorist campaign was integral to the process of primitive accumulation because it undermined the egalitarian solidarity among and between the sexes in village life. This solidarity had existed throughout the middle ages in antithesis to the aristocratic and church elite who ruled, but produced nothing themselves. Such solidarity was an impediment to the monetary penetration of the rural economy, which required (as we can consciously articulate only in hindsight) a new kind of human being: the socially alienated individual. 

In her book, Federici describes the status of women in medieval villages as being at least equal to men. Women, especially older women, were central to the village economy and culture. Women worked as herbalists and pharmacists, as doctors, counsellors, and above all, as mid-wives who controlled the reproduction of human beings by other women. The public persecutions, degradation and burning of witches was intended to terrify the populace and destroy the egalitarian bond between men and women. Between 1550 and 1650 over 100,000 women were publicly burned at the stake. But many more died from torture and other abuses. Witches were portrayed not only as agents of the devil but as dangerous, superstitious practitioners who should be punished and replaced by men. In these ways, women were attacked as dangers to society by both the reactionary Inquisitor and the progressive bourgeois philosopher/scientist. Francis Bacon, one of the fathers of the empirical, scientific method advocated these persecutions. “Magic,” he stated, “kills industry.” He believed the truths of nature should be “tortured” out of her in order to make her the “slave” of man. Thomas Hobbes considered witchcraft a crime against the state that should be punished.  

Like the demonized women of the Paris Commune, and the courageous women of Kobane in Isis- and NATO-tortured Syria today, medieval peasant women stood in the way of privatization.

In Caliban and the Witch, Federici also compares the demonization of women during the transition in Europe from feudalism to mercantilism to the demonization, during the same time period, of the uprooted native peoples in merchant capitalism’s New World colonies: for both 'Caliban and the Witch' violent degradations were imposed in the service of privatization and super-exploitation. I hope to take up that aspect of colonialism within the discussion of the labor theory of value in my next post. But I’ll end this essay on primitive accumulation with a brief discussion of Daniel DeFoe’s Moll Flanders, a book in which Moll’s career unintentionally exemplifies how colonialism allowed capitalism to develop, expand, and prosper despite of and because of the social chaos and misery the processes of primitive accumulation of the privatized means of production and uprooted cheap were creating.

Defoe wrote Moll Flanders in 1722. By then he was a famous author, having published Robinson Crusoe in 1719. DeFoe’s life as a shady merchant, political conspirator, spy, journalist,  genteel land owner (thanks to a fortuitous marriage), bankrupt, and famous author was as colorful as the eponymic heroine of Moll Flanders, who narrates her wild adventures in a straightforward, earnest tone, without a trace of irony. DeFoe’s purpose, obviously, was not satire, but to market a moral tale for an audience (like ours) that could find no contradiction between commerce and morality, nor between both of those and salacious entertainment. The book is still popular and a “great read”. 

The moral of the tale is stated on the title page: “...the famous Moll Flanders...who was born in Newgate [prison] and during a life of continu’d variety for threescore years...was twelve years a whore, five times a wife (whereof once to her own brother), twelve year a thief, eight year a transported felon in Virginia, and at last rich, liv’d honest, and died a penitent. Written from her own Memorandum.” ...In other words, all is forgiven the penitent if, in the end, she achieves the salvation of a secure, honest income of at least 100 pounds per annum, as did Moll, from her plantation in Virginia. 

 DeFoe implicitly defends Moll’s behavior by establishing both the purity of her heart and the venality of the world, within which she, as a woman, is absolutely dependent on men to make her way. But as the creator of Moll’s simple, positive narration, Defoe, in effect defends Moll’s guarded, venal pursuit of security--not because as a woman in a man’s world she must behave so, but simply because greed is good. This centrality of money as the social medium--so subliminally ingrained and stunting in our post modern, bottom-line consciousness--is presented so baldly and earnestly by Defoe/Moll, because, commerce for DeFoe, a chandler’s son and would-be monied land baron, was liberating. 

Moll’s adventures are bracketed by two visits to the Virginia colony and throw light on how colonialism made Defoe’s dream possible in merchant capitalist England. Moll was born in Newgate prison to a woman condemned to death for either petty theft or prostitution or both. Her mother “pleaded her belly” and rather than being hanged was transported to the Virginia Corporation’s newly established colony, probably as an indentured servant. She eventually purchases her freedom and marries another freed felon. Together they find “servants” (other transported felons, or natives) and become rich and respectable growing tobacco. 

Moll grows into a girl in prison and becomes a servant in a respectable middle class family. She is good looking, well mannered, and, wise in the ways of the world, plans her seduction by her seducer --the family’s older son (she likes but doesn’t trust for a second) who promises marriage, gets her pregnant (the first in about 12 pregnancies), and then sloughs her off on his younger brother, whom Moll also likes. They marry. Moll is securely middle class and respectable!

In quick order, she has two more children, one dies, and then so does her husband. Moll is now insecure! She gets her in-law employers to take the remaining children, and with some severance money, Moll smartly sets out in quest of another husband. She quickly attracts a “gentleman trader” to marry, but they part on amiable terms when he has to run to the Continent to avoid his creditors. Another child is found a home. 

Moll’s adventures really begin at this point. She meets an American planter finishing up business with his London banker. He falls in madly in love with Moll, who gets him to convince her to come back with him to Virginia. There Moll becomes close to her husband’s mother, who, like her own mother, was once a transported felon--and who, in fact, turns out to be her own real mother! This startling fact makes Moll’s husband (whom she truly loves, and with which she now has two living children)--her half brother! Moll’s mother convinces her to stay on, but, after a year, Moll’s conscience drives her to find an excuse to return to London, but with commercial papers representing a stock of goods she can invest with a banker to keep her in style enough to find another husband...

We’ll have to skip the many adventures in Molls quest for at least 100 pound per annum respectability...but she eventually falls in with rather decent thieves, is caught and sentenced to death. In Newgate once more, she is reunited with a long-lost husband/soul mate--also sentenced to death after many adventures of his own following his original encounter with Moll at a country estate where they were both pretending to be personages of great wealth and quickly deceived one another--only to discover each other’s duplicity--which only intensified their passion, which they enjoyed while the money lasted,before parting, broken-hearted, but on amiable terms... The reunited pair of elderly con-artists get their sentences commuted to transportation to Virginia, where the son of Moll’s incestuous relation with her brother--his father--generously gives the property he’s inherited from his grandmother to rightful owner, Moll, his mother. The son takes on the stewardship of the plantation.

Moll, rich and repentant, and her true love eventually return to England and the salvation of something more than 100 pounds per annum (from earnings on certificates on stocks of goods produced by “servants” (slaves).

Moll’s adventures and final salvation are founded on the following: the Elizabethan court’s granting a monopoly to the investors who formed the Virginia Corporation, the policy of transportation rather than the gallows (though public executions were many into the late 18th century), the expropriation, enslavement and decimation of native Americans, and the production and sale of tobacco and other products of forced labor. In microcosm, Moll represents the symbiosis between merchant capitalism and colonization, without which English (and European) capitalism could never have survived the demographic crises created by the primitive accumulation of its uprooted workforce. Eventually, the system of transportation, and the spread of colonies world-wide resulted in the emigration of the tens of millions of Europeans. Between 1600 and 1800, for example, the Dutch East India Company alone sent one million Dutchmen (out of an average population of between 5 and 8 million inhabitants of the Netherlands) to Asia. England, of course, populated North America with her poor. Nor could the development  of the system of industrial capitalism and European world domination have been possible without the accumulation of wealth produced in its expanding colonies by uprooted, forced labor. 

The new world order of monopoly finance capitalism continues the same process. But the brutal methods of primitive accumulation practiced by the colonial system of merchant capitalism and industrial capitalism’s imperial system have been digitally and financially, hocus-pocus-democratized. Laboring populations in the neoliberal Periphery of global capitalism--encouraged by humanitarian World Bank directives and their own democratically engineered, security governments, or responding to NATO’s protective bombings of artificially created terrorists--voluntarily uproot themselves! The fortunate find their way out of capital’s vast, world reserve army of labor to providentially provided factories, and to wage labor. They earn a lot less, and are even less secure in their security states, than the lucky 99% at the militarized Center of it all. 

Change is imperative and will come when human consciousness bridges the gap between the workers of the world. Nature and human nature have nothing to lose but their chains. 

My next post will not explain how all this might come about. It will just be about Marx’s labor theory of value, which might help a bit, but will conclude this seminar on my understanding of marxist theory.

Feudalism in Europe evolved unevenly, according to local conditions. In Western Europe, conditions in the North were more primitive than in the romanized South, but by the 7th century, both regions shared certain fundamental features. The feudal order was a patriarchal hierarchy, ruled by military and ecclesiastical elites, who lived upon the surplus produced by non-alienated peasant and artisan labor. Most artisans were also peasants. In the towns (which were still quite small), artisans grouped themselves into protective organizations, had access to raw materials from the countryside, and controlled the production of crafted items.  

Other than the enforced appropriation of a portion of the product of this labor (through rents, tithes, corvee labor, taxes, and share cropping arrangements), the medieval peasant and artisan controlled the what and how of producing the means of life, enjoying customary feudal rights to land, tools, and habitation. It was in the lord’s feudal interest that the peasant and artisan be able, independently, to produce and reproduce themselves. Medieval society reflected the culture and skills of the peasant and artisan, even when mediated by aristocratic and priestly ideology. Both priests and aristocrats relied on the labor of the common people for their food, clothing, tools, arms, and on other myriad craftsmen involved in the construction and furnishing of churches, manors, and castles. Until the 10th century, there were few merchants anywhere in Western Europe. Even in the romanized South--by the 8th century Abbasid Islam controlled the Mediterranean and the old trade routes--most production was for immediate use, not exchange. Money hardly figured into the lives of the vast majority of people, including the elite.

Islamic control of the Western Mediterranean slackened during the 10th century and Western European towns began to revive from the collapse of the Roman system (and the advent of Islamic power in the Mediterranean), first in Italy, and then in the Netherlands. The professional merchant--Italian, Greek, Jew, Syrian, Dutch--began to re-establish himself in the reviving towns. Merchant capitalists had a traditional role in ancient society. They bought and traded the the surplus product that the elite appropriated from the peasants, or bought and traded the goods produced by independently organized artisans. In ancient society, there were large market towns controlled by wealthy merchants. With the revival of trade, merchants performed the same role under feudal conditions. In Northern Italy, merchants took advantage of the political space created by conflicts between feuding lords, and formed independent city states like Venice and Ravenna. Northern trading and manufacturing towns followed in Ghent and Bruges in Flanders. These enclaves of merchants and organized craft workers fought against and allied themselves with one noble faction or another.   

By the 14th century, powerful, semi-independent city states existed in Italy and Flanders. (England and France lagged somewhat behind.) The great merchant capitalist/bankers of Venice, Florence, Ghent or London loaned money to kings and rebellious barons who bought arms and luxuries from other merchants who circulated this money by buying surplus product from landed aristocrats, trading them on the international market in return for more arms and exotic luxury goods and domestic crafts to sell back to aristocrats, who bought them on credit from merchant bankers. The result was the accumulating riches of the merchant bankers and the piling up of debt of the nobility. This debt could only be paid on the backs of the peasantry and the artisans of lesser guilds. 

 The merchant, operating within the pores of feudal society, became “richer than a lord.” Legally, however, merchants were of the 3rd estate, along with peasants, laborers, and vagabonds. Even the most powerful merchant risked the chance of debt repudiation and of being expelled (like 2000 Jews were from England by Edward I in 1290). He might also lose his head. Within their walled cities, merchants were still the legal subjects of the ruling landed aristocracy (in the personage of the baron, king, bishop, etc.). Under the feudal regime, land and title ruled, not money: the value of money depended on the needs of the the lord, his peasants, and the guilds, not on the market. The great mass of goods were still produced for need, only the surplus going to the merchant capitalist, who produced nothing himself and had little control over labor or land or the law. The richer the merchant, the greater his risk in the dangerously paradoxical symbiosis between himself and his indebted lord. It took centuries for merchant capitalism to gain control of feudalism. First the richest merchants bought feudal titles, then  some aristocratic landowners entered the market, and, eventually, so did the king and court--against the more conservative nobility. In the process social relations came to be mediated by money rather than feudal ties and customs--and peasants and artisans progressively lost control of the means of production and of their own lives.  

England is the classic example of the dialectical process of attraction and repulsion between the bourgeois and the aristocrat that destroyed the feudal order, which resulted in the primitive accumulation of a critical mass of uprooted peasants and artisans for the earliest “satanic mills” of merchant-controlled factories and nascent industrial enterprises. We’ll take up this dialectical process in more detail in the next post.

Primitive Accumulation, part 2

Marxists like to refer to the contradictions within the capitalist mode of private production for profit in order to show why it succumbs regularly to crises. I’ll do that too, in my last post of this attempt to explain basic marxism when I deal with the labor theory of value. But if one views capitalism as a social system that must produce and reproduce both its mode of production and its socially necessary work force, capitalism’s contradictions are so fundamentally destructive to that very purpose that one wonders how such a system could have evolved and managed to survive for almost 300 years--almost 200 years since the establishment of hegemonic (industrial) capitalism in mid-19th century England. 

Of course, the most fundamental of all of capitalism’s contradictions is that its privately owned and controlled system of production is necessarily structured (juridically and culturally) to oppose any needs (i.e. social needs, ecological needs) that might hamper its exclusive goal of private profit and the accumulation of personal wealth. Yet capitalism--ideology aside--is not just a system for the production of private wealth. Like all historical social systems, capitalism must satisfy the natural necessity of producing and reproducing all its necessary components--especially the one critical component that concerns us here: what Marx called the primitive accumulation of a permanent reserve army of the unemployed (and the precariously employed) which creates a general sense of social insecurity in the working population. As a matter of fact, for many spokespersons of the capitalist system, from Edmund Burke to Margaret Thatcher, there is no such thing as “society”. Whenever capitalism’s political personifications have been forced (by fear of the working population) to address the myriad social problems capitalism creates, they do so half-heartedly and temporarily, until even that effort seems to them to endanger profits and/or bourgeois political control. Crises, austerity, and wars seem to be capitalism’s “solutions” to its basic social contradictions. 

When we turn to Marx’s labor theory of value we will see how the contradictions  specific to the capitalist mode of production reflect the anti-social conditions historically necessary for its operation. But first we must turn to the historical events which created each of these necessary conditions, without which the emergence of the capitalist system would not have been possible in the first place--and which it must continue to produce and reproduce to maintain its existence: the primitive accumulation of its reserve army of labor: a critical mass of people, uprooted from the basic means of subsistence and forced to work for wages. 

It is important to locate capitalism as a stage (hopefully the last) in the development of Western Civilization’s hierarchic patriarchal orders. We’ll take a brief Google Earth-like look (from a hundred miles up!) at the stages of this development, beginning in the Roman period, then on to medieval Europe, and finally, focusing on England, where a critical mass of potential wage laborers was first employed in the factories of merchant capitalists and in those of nascent industrialists, which led to the industrial revolution and hegemonic capitalism’s wage system in the early 19th century. The initial process of primitive accumulation took centuries. Today the primitive accumulation of capitalism’s global work force is produced and reproduced at breakneck speed by “modernizing” NGO’s, bankers, and bombers.

                                        .........................................

 Western Civilization, originated in the upper Nile Valley, travelled north by conquest and trade to Egypt, then east to Mesopotamia, then along the coastal regions of the Anatolian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, on to Mycenaean Crete and other islands of the Aegean Sea, then along the coasts of the Adriatic and Black Seas. The Old (Upper Nile) Kingdoms of ancient Egypt were transitional from matrilineal social organization to the pharaonic patriarchies of the Second and Third Kingdoms. This Google Earth tour will not focus on the cultural richness and technical achievements of the ancient Mediterranean civilizations, but on the social conditions of its working populations. From this point of view, Rome--which eventually conquered and appropriated the cultures of the entire Mediterranean region--in its glorification of military prowess, its contempt for women and the laboring classes as such--epitomized Western Civilization’s patriarchal hierarchies. 

Having originated from a band of social outcasts who incorporated themselves by abducting (and raping ) women from neighboring tribes, “Rome” quickly expanded into a colonizing military state that spread throughout Italy. Under semi-mythical law-givers like (the patronizing misogynist) Numa, federated tribal councils soon evolved into the Roman senate: an exclusively male club of slave-owning, patrician proprietors of self-sufficient estates. Republican Rome was a complex hierarchy of free citizens: merchants, soldier/slave holding colonists, and the “bread and  circus” plebes of the cities ( freemen who could prove descent from an ancient Roman tribe and who could claim protection and subsidies from an upper class “client”). Roman women were virtually the property of their typically promiscuous husbands, and were praised for their (Roman) purity and submissiveness. 

Slavery was the main form of labor in both republican and imperial Rome. Slaves ranged from highly educated and skilled Greeks to German and Slavic “barbarians.” Slaves were exploited as domestic servants, agrarian workers of the latifundia, brutally driven laborers in state and private mines, oarsmen on merchant ships, skilled artisans in workshops, clerks in stores owned by free businessmen, pedagogues, and scribes. The manufacturing and commercial center of the Empire was in the conquered, Greek, Byzantine, East. Roman senators and other patricians in the Western Empire prided themselves on living self-sufficiently on their estates, where slave-produced surpluses often were sold to traders for money, which was lent out at interest. Slavery in the Roman Empire was not of the ancient, familial type, but very similar to the cold, destructively venal plantation slavery of the Americas--and to the modern wage-slavery exploited in the industrialized fields, factories, and sweat shops of contemporary, global finance capitalism.

 The Roman Empire has been the most admired of the ancient world’s civilizations among the educated bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, the vaunted “Roman peace” was really a “peace” of constant wars of conquest--or against rebelling tribes, provinces, or slaves. (In the words of Tacitus, “...they made a wasteland and called it peace.”) The empire became expensive to maintain, corrupting and enervating those enriched by it. Taxes accumulated. Foreign mercenaries replaced citizen soldiers. By the 3rd century a.d., romanized tribal groups were pressuring the imperial borders which they were bribed and organized to defend.These bands of soldiers and their families, led by “kings,” were in turn being pressured by other, larger, less “civilized” tribal groups to the north and east who were moving southward and westward, toward Rome. In the turmoil, slaves and serfs and indebted farmers often fled their masters and creditors, and turned to barbarian “kings” and “governors” for protection. 

The Roman system didn’t fall, it dissolved. By 476 a.d. (the date usually accepted for the collapse of the Empire in the West), most of the Western half of the Roman Empire was governed by either Ostrogoths (Italy), Visigoths (Spain), Vandals (Africa), Lombards (northern Italy) or Franks (Gaul, southern Germany). While the Western Empire was dissolving and re-forming, Constantinople was founded (330 a.d.) on the site of the ancient city of Byzantium by Constantine as de facto capital of “Rome,” and Christianity was made the official religion (380 a.d.) of the Roman world. 

The fall of the Roman empire did not include the Byzantine East, which held on until 1453, when the Ottomans renamed Constantinople Istanbul. In the West, the bishop of Rome (the pope) remained in Rome (when he could), wielding what remained of Roman imperial power: the cross--at once the means by which Rome terrified and executed its slaves and rebels, and symbol of the temporal and spiritual power of the Roman Church in the evolving feudal order. We’ll take up feudalism in the next post.

Bringing my posts up to date

              Primitive Accumulation and the Labor Theory of Value, Part 2

 Fredric Jameson, the great marxist cultural critic, in Representing ‘Capital’, took up Adorno’s suggestion that the best way to read Capital is backward, which is to say, starting from the chapter on “primitive accumulation” that ends Volume 1.  This seemed to me a good idea, because Marx’s approach to economic analysis (really, all social analysis) is historical, and he and Engels were the inventors of “historical materialism” as an epistemological tool. 

So,before discussing primitive accumulation, I thought I should begin my somewhat quixotic attempt to explain marxism in a hundred words or less with a digression, one that turned out to be the mother of all the digressions that followed, and in need of paring. One needed a little basic philosophy (which is all I have) to grasp historical materialism. So I jousted, in my first posting (May 1) with basic phenomenology (subject/object). I think I won that one. Then, in my second post (May 7), I rode into the lists against “Necessity.” This one failed, because it turned into a premature discussion on the commodity and value. I deleted it.  Bloodied, but not beaten, I took on (June 13) “historical materialism (which included natural necessity and historical necessity).  

Somewhat humbled, I was now prepared to take up the task of presenting Capital backward: primitive accumulation first, and then the economics of the first part of Capital, specifically the labor theory of value. Then, after my mission was accomplished, I could return Rosinante to her stable and leave it to more youthful Don Quijotes to joust with the windmills of late capitalism that, it turns out, are corporate, monopolistic, and imperial--real financial monsters!

Unfortunately, it didn't turn out quite that way. I’m still riding Rosinante. In my last posting (way back on August 15), I felt compelled to digress in order to say some things about patriarchal civilization, which has been built on the ruins of the much more ancient, egalitarian/matrilineal social orders that had existed for millennia and produced the basic tools of humanity--first of all language and thinking--that made patriarchal civilization possible. Patriarchal myths were, and are still intended to subvert older, deeper egalitarian values. Hierarchical patriarchal values of property and domination are ideological foundation of every succeeding hierarchy’s legitimacy. My digression’s intention was to clear a bit of space in our minds (without too much narrative clutter) for an unprejudiced examination of marxism. We are in awe and fear of our jailers, and can sooner envision the end of the world, than the end of capitalism. 

Socialism "failed" not because (Dies irae!) it runs counter to the eternal greed and violence of human nature, but because of its premature and abandoned initial birth among wolves. 

Since the digression into ancient society, it’s been a struggle for me in trying to organize, without major digressions and with concision, the huge topic of primitive accumulation. I’m still working on it. There will be 3 more posts: medieval society in Western Europe (focused on England); the process of primitive accumulation in England (1600-1800); and, finally--going “backwards”--a return to the first chapters of Capital, where Marx applies an historical materialist critique to classical political economy’s labor theory of value, based on his inclusion of use value in the commodity equation. This inclusion of use value displaces the point of view of classical political economy’s analysis from capital’s to labor’s, which brings the material world into Adam Smith’s and David Ricardo’s hermetic calculations, and reveals capitalism’s contradictions. Some of these I’ll sketch out as non-technically as possible, and then try to relate them to the human and ecological crises we face today. My next post, I promise, will be on primitive accumulation...or rather some preliminary stuff on feudalism...