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.
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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.
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