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Political EconomyIntroduction
Political economy belongs to the category of the social sciences.(1) It studies the laws of the social production and distribution of material wealth at the various stages of development of human society.
(1) The name of this science, “political economy”, comes from the Greek words “politeia” and “oikonomia”. The word “politeia” means “social organisation”. The word “oikonomia” is made up of two words: “oikos”-household, or household affairs, and “nomos”-law. The science of political economy received its name only at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
The basis of the life of society is material production. In order to live, people must have food, clothing and other material means of life. In order to have these, people must produce them, they must work.
Men produce the material means of life, i.e., carry on their struggle with nature, not as isolated individuals but together, in groups and societies. Consequently, production is always and under all circumstances social production, and labour is an activity of social man.
The process of producing material wealth presupposes the following factors:
(1) human labour; (2) the subject of labour; and (3) the means of labour.
Labour is a purposive activity of the human being in the process of which he transforms and adapts natural objects so as to satisfy his own requirements. Labour is a natural necessity, an indispensable condition for man’s existence. Without labour human life itself would be impossible.
Everything to which man’s labour is directed is a subject of labour. Subjects of labour may be directly provided by nature, as, for example, wood, which is cut in the forest, or ore, which is extracted from the bowels of the earth. Subjects of labour which have previously been subjected to the action of labour (e.g., ore in a metal works, cotton in a spinning mill, yarn in a weaving mill) are called raw materials.
Means of labour consist of all those things with the aid of which man acts upon the subject of his labour and transforms it. To the category of means of labour belong, first and fore- most, the instruments of production, together with land, buildings used for production purposes, roads, canals, storehouses, etc. The determining role among the means of labour is played by the instruments of production. These comprise the various kinds of tools which man uses in his working activity, beginning with the crude stone implements of primitive man and ending with modern machinery. The level of development of the instruments of production provides the criterion of society’s mastery over nature, the criterion of the development of production. Economic epochs are distinguished one from another not by what is produced but by how material wealth is produced, with what instruments of production.
The subjects of labour and the means of labour constitute the means of production. Means of production in themselves, not associated with labour power, can produce nothing. For the labour process, the process of producing material wealth, to begin, labour power must be united with the instruments of production.
Labour power is man’s ability to work, the sum total of the physical and spiritual forces of man, thanks to which he is able to produce material wealth.
Labour power is the active element in production, which sets the means of production in motion. With the development of the instruments of production man’s ability to work also develops, his skill, habits of work, and production experience.
The instruments of production, by means of which material wealth is produced, and the people who set these instruments in motion and accomplish the production of material values, thanks to the production experience and habits of work which they possess, constitute the productive forces of society. The working masses are the basic productive force of human society in all stages of its development.
The productive forces reflect the relationship of people to the objects and forces of nature used for the production of material wealth. In production, however, men act not only upon nature but also upon each other.
“They produce only by co-operating in a certain way and mutually exchanging their activities. In order to produce, they enter into definite connections and relations with one another and only within these social connections and relations does their action on nature, does production, take place.” (Marx, “Wage-Labour and Capital”, Marx and Engels, Selected Works, 1950, English edition, vol. I, p. 83.)
The definite social connections and relations formed between people in the process of the production of material wealth constitute production relations. Production relations include: (a) forms of ownership of the means of production; (b) the position of the various social groups in production which result from this, and their mutual relations; (c) the forms of distribution of products that follow from the ownership of the means of production and people’s position in production.
The character of production relations depends on who owns the means of production (land, woods, waters, subsoil, raw materials, instruments of production, buildings used for production, means of communication and transport, etc.)whether they are the property of particular persons, social groups or classes, which use these means of production in order to exploit the working people, or whether they are the property of society, whose aim is the satisfaction of the material and cultural requirements of the masses of the people, of society as a whole. The state of production relations shows how the means of production are distributed among the members of society and, consequently, how the material wealth produced by people is distributed. Thus, the determining feature, the basis of production relations is one or another form of property in the means of production.
The relations of production determine also corresponding relations of distribution. Distribution is the connecting link between production and consumption.
The products which are produced in society serve either productive or personal consumption.
Productive consumption means the use of means of production to create material wealth. Personal consumption means the satisfaction of man’s requirements in food, clothing, shelter, etc.
The distribution of the objects of personal consumption which are produceddepends on the distribution of the means of production. In capitalist society the means of production belong to the capitalists, and in consequence the products of labour also belong to the capitalists. The workers are deprived of means of production and, so as not to die of hunger, are obliged to work for the capitalists, who appropriate the products of their labour. In socialist society the means of production are public property. In consequence, the products of labour belong to the working people themselves.
In those social formations in which commodity production exists, the distribution of material wealth takes place through exchange of commodities.
Production, distribution, exchange and consumption constitute a unity, in which the determining role is played by production. The particular forms of distribution, exchange and consumption so determined exert in their turn a reciprocal influence upon production, either facilitating its development or hindering it.
The sum total of the
“relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which’ correspond definite forms of social consciousness.” (Marx, “Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” Marx and Engels, Selected Works, 1950, English edition, vol. I, p. 329).
Having come into existence, the superstructure exercises in its turn a reciprocal active influence on the basis, hastening or hindering the development of the latter.
Production has a technical aspect and a social aspect. The technical aspect of production is studied. by the natural and technical sciences: physics, chemistry, metallurgy, engineering, agronomy and others. Political economy studies the social aspect of production, the social-production, i.e., the economic, relations between people. “Political economy”, wrote V. I. Lenin, “is not at all concerned with ‘production’ but with the social relations between people in production, the social system of production.” (Lenin, “Development of Capitalism in Russia”, Works, vol. III, pp. 40-1.)
Political economy studies production relations in their interaction with the productive forces. The
productive forc6S and the production relations as a unity constitute the mode of production.
The productive forces are the most mobile and revolutionary factor in production. The development
of production begins with changes in the productive forces-first of all with changes and development in the instruments of production, and thereafter corresponding changes also take place in the sphere of production relations. Production relations between men, which develop in dependence upon the development of the productive forces, themselves in turn actively affect the productive forces.
The productive forces of society can develop uninterruptedly only where the production relations correspond to the nature of the productive forces. At a certain stage of their development the productive forces outgrow the framework of the given production relations and come into contradiction with them. The production relations are transformed from being forms of development of the productive forces into fetters upon them.
As a result, the old production relations sooner or later give place to new ones, which correspond to the level of development which has been attained and to the character of the productive forces of society. With the change in the economic basis of society its superstructure also changes. The material premises for the replacement of old production relations by new ones arise and develop within the womb of the old formation. The new production relations open up scope for the development of the productive forces.
Thus an economic law of the development of society is the law of obligatory correspondence of production relations to the nature of the productive forces.
In society based on private property and the exploitation of man by man, conflicts between the productive forces and the production relations are expressed in the form of class struggle; In these conditions the replacement of an old mode of production by a new one is effected by way of social revolution. Political economy is an historical science. It is concerned with material production in its historically determined social form, with the economic laws which are inherent in particular modes of production. Economic laws express the essential nature of economic phenomena and processes, the internal,causal connection and dependence existing between them.
The laws of economic development are objective laws. They arise and operate on the basis of definite economic conditions independent of men’s will. Men can understand these laws and utilise them in society’s interests, but they can neither abolish nor create economic laws.
The utilising of economic laws in class society always has a class character: the advanced class of each social formation makes use of economic laws to serve the progressive development of society, while the moribund classes resist this.
Each mode of production has its own basic economic law.
This basic economic law expresses the essence of the given mode of production and determines its
main aspects and line of development.
Political economy
“must first investigate the special laws of each separate stage in the evolution of production and exchange, and only when it has completed this investigation will it be able to establish the few quite general laws which hold good for production and exchange as a whole”. (Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1936, Lawrence & Wishart edition, p.165.)
Consequently, the development of the various social formations is governed both by their own specific economic laws and also by those economic laws which are common to all formations, e.g., the law of obligatory correspondence of the production relations to the character of the productive forces. Hence social formations are not only marked off one from another by the specific economic laws inherent in each given mode of production, but also are linked. together by a few economic laws which are common to all formations.
Political economy studies the following basic types of production relations which are known to history: the primitive-communal system, the slave-owning system, feudalism, capitalism, socialism.
The primitive-communal system is a pre-class system. The slave-owning system, feudalism and capitalism are different forms of society based on the enslavement and exploitation of the working masses. Socialism is a social system which is free from exploitation of man by man.
Political economy investigates how social production develops from lower, stages to higher stages, and how the social orders which are based on exploitation of man by man arise, develop and are abolished. It shows how the entire course of historical development prepares the way for the victory of the socialist mode of production. It studies, furthermore, the economic laws of socialism the laws of the origin of socialist society and its subsequent development along the road to the higher phase of communism.
Thus political economy is the science of the development of the social- productive, i.e., economic, relations between men. It elucidates the laws which regulate the production and distribution of material wealth in human society at the different stages of its development.
The method of Marxist political economy is the method of dialectical materialism. Marxist-Leninist political economy is built up by applying the fundamental propositions of dialectical and historical materialism to the study of the economic structure of society.
Unlike the natural sciences -physics, chemistry, etc.- political economy cannot make use in its study of the economic structure of society of experiments or tests carried out in artificially created laboratory conditions which eliminate phenomena that hinder examination of a process in its purest form. “In the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both.” (Marx, Capital, vol. I, Kerr edition, p. 12.)
Every economic system presents a contradictory and complicated picture. The task of scientific research consists in revealing by means of theoretical analysis the deep-seated processes and fundamental features of the economy which lie behind the outward appearance of economic phenomena and express the essential character of the particular production relations concerned, abstracting these from secondary features.
What emerges from such scientific analysis is economic categories, i.e., concepts which represent the theoretical expression of the real production relations of the particular social formation concerned, such as, for example, commodity, value, money, economic accounting, profitability, work-day, etc.
Marx’s method consists of gradually ascending from the simplest of economic categories to more complex ones, which corresponds to the progressive development of society on an ascending line, from lower stages to higher. When such a procedure is used in investigating the categories of political economy, logical investigation is combined with historical analysis of social development.
Marx, in his analysis of capitalist production relations, singles out first of all the everyday relationship which is the simplest of all and the most frequently repeated-the exchange of one commodity for another. He shows that in the commodity, this cell-form of capitalist economy, the contradictions of capitalism are laid up in embryo. With analysis of the commodity as his point of departure, Marx explains the origin of money, discloses the process of transforming money into capital, the essential nature of capitalist exploitation. Marx shows how social development leads inevitably to the downfall of capitalism, to the victory of communism.
Lenin pointed out that political economy must be expounded in the form of the characterisation of the successive periods of economic development. In conformity with this, in the present course of political economy, the basic categories of political economy -commodity, value, money, capital, etc.- are examined in the historical order of succession in which they arose at different stages in the development of human society. Thus, elementary concepts concerning commodities and money are presented already when pre-capitalist formations are being described. These categories are later set forth in fully- developed form when capitalist economy, in which they attain their full development, is being studied. The same order of exposition will also be employed when socialist economy is dealt with. An elementary notion of the basic economic law .of socialism, of the law of planned, proportional development of the national economy, of distribution according to work done, and of value, money, etc., will be given in the section devoted to the transitional period from capitalism ‘ to socialism. An expanded treatment of these laws and categories will be given in the section “The Socialist System of National Economy”.
Political economy, unlike history, does not undertake to study the historical process of society’s development in all its concrete variety. It provides basic concepts concerning the fundamental features of each system of social economy. Besides political economy there are also a number of other scientific disciplines which are concerned with the study of economic relations in the various branches of the national economy on the basis of the laws discovered by political economy-industrial economics, agricultural economics, etc.
Political economy studies, not some transcendental questions detached from life, but very real and living questions which affect the vital interests of men, society, classes. Are the downfall of capitalism and the triumph of the socialist system of economy inevitable; do the interests of capitalism contradict those of society and of the progressive development of mankind; is the working class capitalism’s grave-digger and the bearer of the idea of the liberation of society from capitalism-all these and similar questions are answered differently by different economists, depending on which class’s interests they voice.
That is just why there does not exist one single political economy for all classes of society, but instead several political economies: bourgeois political economy, proletarian political economy, and also the political economy of the intermediate classes, petty-bourgeois political economy.
It follows from this, however, that those economists are quite wrong who assert that political economy is a neutral, non-party science, that political economy is independent of the struggle between classes in society and not connected either directly or indirectly with any political party.
Is it possible in general for a political economy to exist which is objective, impartial and does not fear the truth? Certainly this is possible. Such an objective political economy can only be the political economy of that class which has no interest in slurring over the contradictions and sore places of capitalism, which has no interest in preserving the capitalist order: the class whose interests merge with the interests of liberating society from capitalist slavery, whose interests coincide with the interests of mankind’s progressive development. Such a class is the working class. Therefore an objective and disinterested political economy can only be that which is based on the interests of the working class. This political economy is the political economy of Marxism-Leninism.
Marxist political economy is a very important component of Marxist-Leninist theory.
The great leaders and theoreticians of the working class, K. Marx and F. Engels, were the founders of proletarian political economy. In his work of genius, Capital, Marx revealed the laws of the rise, development and’ downfall of capitalism; and showed, the economic grounds for the inevitability of socialist revolution and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx and Engels worked out in general terms the theory of the transition period from capitalism to socialism and of the two phases of communist society.
The economic teachings of Marxism underwent further creative development in the works of V.I. Lenin, founder of the Communist Party and the Soviet State, brilliant continuer of the work of Marx and Engels. Lenin enriched Marxist economic science by generalising the new experience of historical development, created the Marxist teaching on imperialism, revealed the economic and political nature of imperialism, provided the initial propositions for the basic economic law of modern capitalism, worked out the fundamentals of the theory of the general crisis of capitalism, created a new, complete theory of socialist revolution, and worked out scientifically the basic problems of the building of socialism and communism..
Lenin’s great companion-in-arms and pupil, J.V. Stalin, put forward and developed a number of new propositions in political economy, based on the fundamental works of Marx, Engels and Lenin which had created a really scientific political economy.
Marxist-Leninist economic theory is creatively developed in the resolutions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and of the fraternal Communist Parties and the works of the pupils and companions-in-arms of Lenin and Stalin-the leaders of these parties, who have enriched economic science with new conclusions and propositions on the basis of generalising the practice of the revolutionary struggle and of the building of socialism and communism.
Marxist-Leninist political economy is a powerful weapon of ideas in the hands of the working class and of all working mankind in their struggle for emancipation from capitalist oppression. The living strength of the economic theory of Marxism-Leninism consists in the fact that it arms the working class and the working masses with knowledge of the laws of the economic development of society, giving them clear prospects and confidence in the ultimate victory of Communism.
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I. The Primitive Communal Mode of ProductionPart I : PRE-CAPITALIST MODES OF PRODUCTION
CHAPTER I : THE PRIMITIVE COMMUNAL MODE OF PRODUCTION
The Rise of Human Society
The rise of man belongs to the present, the Quaternary period of the earth's history, which science reckons as a little less than a million years. In various regions of Europe, Asia and Africa distinguished by their warm and moist climates there dwelt a highly developed species of anthropoid ape. As a result of a very long development, which included a number of transitional stages, from these remote ancestors there originated man.
The emergence of man was one of the greatest turning points in the development of nature. This turning point took place when man's ancestors began to make implements of labour. The fundamental difference between man" and animal starts only with the making of implements, though they be the very simplest. It is well known that apes often use a stick or stone to knock fruit from a tree or to defend themselves from attack. But not a single animal has ever made even the most primitive implement. The conditions of their daily lives drove man's ancestors to make implements. Experience taught them that sharpened stones could be used for defence against attack or for hunting animals. Man's ancestors began to make stone implements, striking one stone against another. In this way a start was made in the making of implements. With the making of implements labour begins.
Thanks to labour the fore-paws of the anthropoid ape were converted into the hands of man. Remains of the ape-man-a transitional stage from ape to man-found by archaeologists afford evidence of this. The ape-man's brain was much smaller than the human brain, but his hand was already comparatively little different from that of man. It follows that the hand is not only an organ of labour, but also its product.
As hands became freed for acts of labour, man's ancestors acquired an ever more upright gait. Once the hands were occupied with labour the final transition to an upright gait took place, and this played a very important part in making man.
Man's ancestors lived in hordes, or herds; the first men also lived in herds. But between men there arose a link which did not, and could not, exist in the animal world: the link through labour. Men made implements jointly and jointly they applied them. Consequently, the rise of man was also the rise of human society, the transition from the zoological to the social condition.
Men's common labour led to the rise and development of articulate speech. Language is the means, the implement by which men communicate with one another, exchange opinions and achieve mutual understanding.
The exchange of thoughts is a constant and vital necessity, since without it the common activities of men in their struggle with the forces of nature, and the very existence of social production, are impossible.
Labour and articulate speech had a decisive influence in perfecting man's organism, in the development of his brain. The development of language is closely linked with the development of thought. In the process of labour man's circle of perceptions and conceptions was widened, his sensory organs were perfected. Man's labour activities became conscious acts as distinct from the instinctive activities of animals.
Thus, labour is "the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself". (Engels, "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man", Man: and Engels, Selected Works, 1950, English edition, vol. II, p. 74.) Thanks to labour, human society arose and began to develop.
Conditions of Material Life.
The Development of the Implements of Labour
In primitive times man was extremely dependent on his natural surroundings; he was completely weighed down by the difficulties of existence, by the difficulties of his struggle with nature. The process of mastering the elemental forces of nature went on extremely slowly, since the implements of labour were extremely primitive. Man's first implements were roughly chipped stones and sticks. They were like artificial extensions of his bodily organs: the stone, of his fist, the stick, of his outstretched arm.
Men lived in groups whose numbers did not exceed a few dozen persons: a greater single number could not have provided food for themselves. When groups met clashes sometimes took place between them. Many groups perished from hunger or became the prey of wild animals. In these conditions labour in common was for men the only possible form of labour and an absolute necessity.
For a long time primitive man lived mainly by means of food gathering and hunting, both carried out collectively with the help of the simplest implements. What was jointly obtained was jointly consumed. Cannibalism occurred among primitive men as a consequence of the precariousness of the food supply. In the course of many thousands of years, as though groping their way, by means of an extremely slow accumulation of experience, men learned to make the simplest implements suitable for striking, cutting, digging and the other very simple activities which then almost exhausted the whole sphere of production.
The discovery of fire was a great victory for primitive man in his struggle with nature. At first men learned to make use of fire which had arisen naturally. They saw lightning set fire to a tree, observed forest fires and the eruptions of volcanoes. The fire which had been obtained by chance was long and carefully preserved. Only after many thousands of years did man learn the secret of making fire. With more advanced production of implements men observed that fire came from friction and learned to make it.
The discovery of fire and its application gave men dominion over specific natural forces. Primitive man had finally broken away from the animal world: the long epoch of his becoming human had been completed. Thanks to the discovery of fire the conditions of material life for man changed fundamentally. First, fire could be used to prepare food, as a result of which the number of edible objects available to man was increased: it became possible to eat fish, meat, starchy roots, tubers and so on prepared with the help of fire. Secondly, fire began to play an important part in making the implements of production. Thirdly, it "also afforded protection against cold, thanks to which it became possible for men to spread over the greater part of the world. Fourthly, fire afforded a defence against wild beasts.
For a long time hunting remained the most important source of the means of existence. It provided men with skins for clothes, bones with which to make implements, and meat which influenced the further development of the human organism and primarily the development of the brain.
As his physical and mental development progressed man became able to perfect his implements. A stick with a sharpened end served for hunting. Then he began to fix sharpened stones to the stick. Stone-tipped spears, stone axes, scrapers and knives, harpoons and fish-hooks appeared. These implements made possible the hunting of large animals and the development of fishing.
Stone remained the chief material for implement-making for a very long time. The epoch when stone implements predominated, which lasted for hundreds of thousands of years, is called the Stone Age. Only later did man learn to make implements of metal; at first of native metal, in the first instance copper (but copper, being a soft metal, was not widely used to make implements), later of bronze (an alloy of copper and tin), and finally of iron. Thus, after the Stone Age the Bronze Age followed, and after that the Iron Age.
The earliest traces of the smelting of copper in Hither Asia date from the fifth to fourth millennia B.C. In Southern and Central Europe the smelting of copper arose in approximately the third to second millennia B.C. The oldest traces of bronze in Mesopotamia date from the fourth millennium B.C.
The earliest traces of the smelting of iron have been discovered in Egypt and Mesopotamia; they date from before 2000 B.C. In Western Europe the Iron Age began about 1000 B.C.
The invention of the bow and arrow, with the appearance of which hunting began to provide more of the necessities of life, was an important landmark on the road to improving the implements of labour. The development of hunting led to the origin of primitive cattle-breeding. Hunters began to domesticate animals. The dog was domesticated earlier than other animals, and later goats, cattle, pigs and horses.
The origin of primitive agriculture was a further great stride in the development of society's productive forces. While gathering fruits and roots of plants, primitive men began to notice that grains which were dropped on the ground sprouted. Thousands of times this remained uncomprehended, but sooner or later the connection of these phenomena was established in primitive man's mind, and he began to cultivate plants. Thus agriculture arose.
For a long time it remained extremely primitive. The earth was broken up by hand, at first with a simple stick, then with a stick with a hooked end, a hoe. In the river valleys the seeds were scattered on the mud which had been brought down by the river floods. The domestication of animals made possible the use of cattle for draught purposes. Later, when men learned to smelt metal, and metal implements appeared, their application made agricultural labour more productive. Tillage acquired a firmer basis. Primitive tribes began to adopt a settled mode of life.
The Production Relations of Primitive Society.
Natural Division of Labour
Production relations are determined by the character and condition of the productive forces. In primitive communal society the basis of production relations is communal property in the means of production. Communal property corresponds to the character of the productive forces in this period. The implements of labour. in primitive society were so crude that they prevented primitive man from struggling with the forces of nature and wild animals singlehanded. "This primitive type collective or co-operative production", Marx wrote, "was, of course, the result of the weakness of the individual and not of the socialisation of the means of production." ("Rough drafts of Marx's Letter to Vera Zasulich", Marx and Engels, Works, Russian edition, vol. XXVII, p. 681.) Hence came the necessity for collective labour, for common property in land and other means of production as well as in the products of labour. Primitive men had no conception of private ownership of the means of production. Only certain implements of production, those which were also implements of defence against wild animals, were their private property, used by separate members of the commune.
Primitive man's labour created no overplus beyond what was essential for life, that is no surplus product. In such conditions there could be no classes or exploitation of man by man in primitive society. Social property extended only to small communities which were more or less isolated from one another. As Lenin put it, the social character of production here embraced only the members of one community.
The labour activity of men in primitive society was based on simple cooperation. Simple co-operation is the simultaneous application of more or less considerable labour force to perform work of the same kind. Even simple cooperation gave primitive men the possibility of performing tasks which would have been unthinkable for a single man (for example, in hunting large animals).
In the extremely low level of development of productive forces which then existed the meagre food was divided equally. There could be no other division, since the products of labour scarcely sufficed to satisfy the most essential needs: if one member of a primitive community received more than the share which was equal for all, then someone else would be doomed to starvation and death. Thus, equal distribution of the products of common labour was inevitable.
The custom of equal division was deeply rooted among primitive peoples. It has been observed by travellers living among tribes at a low level of social development. More than a hundred years ago the great naturalist Darwin made a voyage round the world. Describing the life of tribes on Tierra del Fuego he relates the following incident: The Tierra del Fuegans were given a piece of canvas; they tore the canvas into completely equal parts so that each one should have an equal share.
The basic economic law of primitive communal society consisted in the securing of the vitally necessary means of existence with the help of primitive implements of production, on the basis of communal. ownership of the means of production, by means of common labour and the equal distribution of the products.
As the implements of production are developed, division of labour arises. Its simplest form was the natural division of labour, i.e., division of labour dependent on sex and age, between men and women, between adults, children and old people.
The famous Russian traveller Miklukho-Maklai, who in the second half of the nineteenth century studied the life of the New Guinea Papuans, thus describes the collective process of labour in tillage. Several men stand in a row and. thrust sharpened sticks deep into the soil and then, with one heave, raise a great lump of earth. The women follow after them crawling on their knees. In their hands they have sticks with which they break up the soil raised by the men. Children of various ages go behind the women, rubbing the soil out with their hands. After the soil has been crumbled the women, using little sticks, make depressions m the soil and bury seeds or plant roots in them. Labour here is collective in character and at the same time there exists division of labour by sex and age.
As productive forces developed, the natural division of labour gradually became stable and consolidated. The specialisation of men in the sphere of hunting, of women in the sphere of gathering vegetable food and housekeeping, led to a certain increase in the productivity of labour.
Clan Society. The Matriarchal Clan.
The Patriarchal Clan
While the process of man's separation from the animal world was taking place people lived in herds or hordes as their immediate ancestors had done. Subsequently, in connection with the rise of primitive economy and the growth of population, the clan organisation of society gradually came into existence.
In those times only people in kinship relation with one another could unite for common labour. Primitive implements of production limited the possibility of collective labour within the narrow framework of a group of people linked by kinship and life together. Primitive man was usually hostile to anyone who was not tied to him by kinship and life together. The clan was a group at first consisting of a few dozen persons in all and linked by the bond of blood relationship. Every such group existed separately from other such groups. With the passage of time the clan's numbers increased, reaching several hundred persons. The habit of common existence developed the benefits of common labour more and more compelled men to stay together.
Morgan, a student of the life of primitive peoples described the clan structure which was still preserved among the Iroquois Indians in the middle of the last century. Hunting, fishing, the gathering of fruits of the earth and tillage were the basic occupations of the Iroquois: Labour was divided between men and women. Hunting and fishing, the making of weapons and implements of labour clearance of the soil, the building of huts and fortifications were the men's duties. The women carried out the basic field work gathered the harvest and stored it, cooked, made clothing and earthenware and gathered wild fruit, berries, nuts and tubers. The land was the clan's common property. The heavier work -cutting down trees, clearance of the land for arable, large hunting expeditions- was carried out in common. The Iroquois lived in socalled "great houses" accommodating twenty families and more. Such a group had common stores where their stock of provisions was kept. The woman at the head of the group divided the food among the separate families. In time of warfare the clan chose itself a war chief who had no material benefits; with the end of warfare his power ceased.
At the first stage of clan society[1] woman had the leading position and this followed from the material conditions of men's life at that period. Hunting with the help of the most primitive implements, which was the men's business, could not completely secure the community's livelihood; its results were more or less fortuitous. In such conditions even the embryonic forms of agriculture and cattle-breeding (the domestication of animals) were of great economic significance. They were a more reliable and constant source of livelihood than hunting. But tillage of the soil and cattle-breeding, so long as they were carried on by primitive methods, were predominantly the occupation of the women who remained near the domestic hearth while the men were hunting. Throughout a lengthy period woman played the dominant part in the clan community. Kinship was reckoned in the maternal line. This was the maternal or matriarchal clan (matriarchy).
In the course of further development of the productive forces when nomadic breeding of cattle (pastoral economy) and a more developed agriculture (corngrowing), which were the men's concern, began to playa decisive part in the life of the primitive community, the matriarchal ‘clan was replaced by the paternal or patriarchal clan (patriarchy). The dominant position passed to the man. He put himself at the head of the clan community. Kinship began to be reckoned in the paternal line. The patriarchal clan existed in the last period of primitive communal society.
The absence of private property, of a class division of society and of the exploitation of man by man precluded the possibility of the State appearing.
In primitive society... there were yet no signs of the existence of the State. We find the predominance of custom, authority, respect, the power enjoyed by the elders of the tribe; we find this power sometimes accorded to women... but nowhere do we find a special category of people who are set apart to rule others and who, in the interests and with the purpose of rule, systematically and permanently command a certain apparatus of coercion, an apparatus of violence ..." (Lenin, "The State", a lecture delivered at the Sverdlov University, July 11, 1919, Selected Works, Twelve-volume English edition, vol. XI, p. 643.)
The Rise if Social Division if Labour and Exchange
With the advance to cattle-breeding and agriculture there arose the social division of labour, that is, the division of labour under which at first different communities, and then individual members of communities as well, began to engage in differing forms of productive activity. The separation of the pastoral tribes was the first great social division of labour.
The pastoral tribes engaged in breeding cattle achieved substantial successes. They learned to care for the cattle in such a way that they received more meat, wool and milk. This first big social division of labour already led to what was for that age a noticeable rise in the productivity of labour.
For a long time in the primitive community there was no basis for exchange; the whole product was obtained and consumed in common. Exchange first originated and developed between clan communities, and for a long time was fortuitous.
With the appearance of the first great social division of labour the situation changed. Among the pastoral tribes there appeared a certain surplus of cattle, milk products, meat, hides and wool. At the same time they experienced a need for products of the soil. In their turn the tribes engaged in agriculture achieved as time went on considerable successes in the output of agricultural produce. Tillers of the soil and breeders of cattle required products which they could not produce within their own economy. All this led to the development of exchange. Other forms of productive activity also developed side by side with tillage of the soil and cattle-breeding. Even in the period of stone implements men learned to make vessels from clay. Later, hand weaving appeared. Finally, with the discovery of iron smelting it became possible to make metal implements of labour (the wooden plough with iron share, the iron axe) and weapons (iron swords). It became ever more difficult to combine these forms of labour with tillage of the soil or pastoral labour. In the communities men engaged in handicraft gradually separated out. The handiwork of the craftsmen -blacksmiths, weapon-makers, potters and so on- began more and more frequently to be offered for exchange. The field of exchange considerably widened.
The Rise of Private Property and Classes.
The Breakdown of Primitive Communal Society
Primitive communal society came to full flower under matriarchy. The patriarchal clan already concealed in itself the seeds of the breakdown of the primitive communal structure. The production relations of primitive communal society up to a certain period corresponded to the level of development of the productive forces. In the last stage of patriarchy, however, with the appearance of new, more improved implements of production (the Iron Age), the production relations of primitive society ceased to correspond to the new productive forces. The narrow framework of communal property and the equal distribution of the products of labour began to act as a brake on the development of new productive forces.
Formerly it had been possible to work a field only by the joint labour of dozens of men. In such conditions common labour was a necessity. With the development of the implements of production and the growth of the productivity of labour one family was now in a position to work a plot of land and secure for itself the essential means of existence. Thus the perfecting of implements of production made possible the advance to an individual economy, which was more productive in those historical conditions. Joint labour and a communal economy became less and less necessary. While common labour demanded common property in the means of production, individual labour demanded private property.
The origin of private property is inseparably linked with the social division of labour and the development of exchange. At first exchange was carried out by the heads of the clan communities-by the elders or patriarchs. They took part in barter deals as representatives of the communities. What they exchanged was the property of the community. But as social division of labour developed further, and exchanges expanded, the clan chiefs gradually began to treat communal property as their own.
At first the chief item of exchange was cattle. Pastoral communities had large flocks of sheep and goats and herds of cattle. The elders and patriarchs, who already held great power in society, became accustomed to dispose of these herds as their own property. Their right in fact to dispose of the herds was also recognised by the other members of the community. Thus first of all cattle, and then gradually all the implements of production, became private property. Common property in land was preserved longest of all.
The development of the productive forces and the appearance of private property led to the breakdown of the clan. The clan fell apart into large patriarchal families. Then, within the large patriarchal family, individual family units began to separate out, converting the implements of production, utensils and cattle into their own private property. The ties of clan became weakened with the growth of private property. The village community began to occupy the place of the clan community. The village, or neighbourhood, community as distinct from the clan consisted of people not necessarily bound by kinship. House, household goods, cattle, all were in the private ownership of individual families. On the other hand, woods, meadows, water and other natural amenities, and also for a definite period the ploughland, were communal property. At first the ploughland was periodically re-divided between the members of the community, but later it began to pass into private hands.
The rise of private property and exchange was the beginning of a great turning-point in the whole structure of primitive society. The development of private property and property distinctions led to the result that within the communities different interests arose among different groups. In these conditions the individuals who in the community held the offices of elders, military leaders and priests used their position to enrich themselves. They acquired a considerable share of the communal property. The bearers of these social offices became more and more distinct from the mass of members of the community, forming a clan aristocracy and more and more frequently passing on their power to their heirs. Aristocratic families became at the same time the richest families. The mass of the members of the community gradually fell into one form or another of economic dependence on the rich and aristocratic upper stratum.
With the growth of productive forces, man"s labour applied to cattle-breeding and agriculture began to yield greater means of subsistence than were essential to maintain man"s life. The possibility arose of appropriating surplus labour and the surplus product, that is, the surplus of labour and product above what was needed to maintain the worker himself and his family. In these conditions it became advantageous not to kill men taken prisoner, as had formerly been done, but to make them work, converting them into slaves. The slaves were seized by the more aristocratic and richer families. In its turn slave labour led to a further growth of inequality, since the households using slaves grew rich quickly. In conditions of the growth of property inequality the rich began to convert into slaves not only prisoners but also their own impoverished and indebted fellow-tribesmen. Thus the first class division of society arose, the division into slave-owners and slaves. There appeared the exploitation of man by man, that is, the uncompensated appropriation by some of the products of the labour of others.
The relations of production prevailing in primitive communal society broke down, perished and made way for new relations of production, suited to the character of new productive forces.
Common labour gave way to individual labour, social property to private property" clan society to class society. The whole history of mankind from this period onwards, right up to the building of socialist society, became the history of class struggle.
Bourgeois ideologists represent matters as if private property had existed for ever. History refutes such inventions and convincingly bears witness to the fact that all people passed through the stage of primitive communal society based on communal property, and knowing no private property.
Social Conceptions of the Primitive Epoch
Primitive man, weighed down by need and the difficulties of his struggle for existence, at first did not distinguish himself from his natural surroundings. For a long time he had no really coherent conceptions either of himself or of the natural conditions of his existence.
Only gradually did very limited and crude conceptions of himself and of the conditions surrounding his life begin to take shape in the mind of primitive man. There could not be the slightest trace of religious views which, as the defenders of religion assert were allegedly inherent in the human consciousness from the very outset. Only later did primitive man -not being in a position to understand and explain the phenomena of nature and social life around him- in his conceptions begin to people the world around him with supernatural beings, spirits and magical powers. He attributed spiritual existence to the forces of nature. This was the socalled animism (from the Latin anima-the spirit, soul). Primitive myths and primitive religion were born of these dim conceptions in men of their own nature and that around them. In them the primitive equality of the social structure was reproduced. Primitive man not knowing class division and property inequality in real life introduced no corresponding subordination in his imaginary world of spirits. He divided the spirits into his own and others" friendly and hostile. Division of the spirits into higher and lower appeared only when the primitive community was breaking down.
Primitive man felt himself an inseparable part of the clan. He could not imagine himself outside the clan. A reflection of this in ideology was the cult of the ancestral progenitors of the clan. It is characteristic that in the course of the development of language "I" and "my" arise much later than other words. The power of the clan over the individual was exceedingly strong. The breakdown of the primitive community was accompanied by the origin and spread of conceptions associated with private property. This was clearly reflected in myths and religious conceptions. When private property relations began to be established, and property inequality appeared, among many tribes there arose the custom of imposing a religious prohibition -"taboo"- on goods appropriated by the leaders or rich families (the inhabitants of the Pacific Islands used the word "taboo" for everything that was prohibited or taken out of common use). With the breakdown of the primitive community and the rise of private property, the power of religious prohibition began to be used to reinforce the new economic relations and property inequality which had come into existence.
BRIEF CONCLUSIONS
(1) Thanks to labour, men emerged from the animal world and human society arose. The distinctive feature of human labour is the making of implements of production.
(2) The productive forces of primitive society were on an exceedingly low level, the implements of production were extremely primitive. This necessitated collective labour, social property in the means of production and equal distribution. In the primitive community there was no property inequality or private property in the means of production; there were no classes or exploitation of man by man. Social ownership of the means of production was confined within a narrow framework; it was the property of small communities more or less isolated from one another.
(3) "The basic economic law of the primitive community consists in the securing of man"s vitally necessary means of subsistence with the help of primitive implements of production, on the basis of communal property in the means of production, by means of common labour and the equal distribution of the products.
(4) Working together, men for a long time performed uniform labour. The gradual improvement of implements of production promoted the rise of a natural division of labour, depending on sex and age. Further perfecting of the implements of production and the mode of obtaining the means of life, the development of cattle-breeding and. agriculture led to the appearance of the social division of labour and exchange, of private property and property inequality, to the division of society into classes and to the exploitation of man by man. Thus the growing forces of production entered into contradiction with the relations of production, as a. result of which primitive communal society gave way to another type of relations of production-the slave-owning system.
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II. The Slave-Owning Mode of ProductionRise of the Slave-Owning System
Slavery is the first and crudest form of exploitation in history. In the past it existed among almost all peoples.
The transition from the primitive community to the slave-owning system took place for the first time in history in the countries of the ancient East. The slave-owning mode of production predominated in Mesopotamia (Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria and others), Egypt, India and China by the fourth millennium B.C. in some cases, and not later than the second millennium B.C. in others. In the first millennium B.C. the slave-owning mode of production was dominant in Transcaucasia (Urartu); from the eighth or seventh centuries B.C. to the fifth or sixth centuries A.D. a powerful slave-owning State existed in Khorezm. The culture achieved in the slave-owning countries of the ancient East greatly influenced the development of the peoples of European countries.
In Greece the slave-owning mode of production reached its height in the fifth to fourth centuries B.C. Subsequently slavery developed in the States of Asia Minor, Macedonia (from the fourth to the first centuries B.C.). The slave-owning system reached the highest stage of its development in Rome in the period from the second century B.C. to the second century A.D.
At first slavery bore a patriarchal or domestic character. There were comparatively few slaves. Slave labour was not yet the basis of production but played a subsidiary part in the economy. The aim of the economy remained the satisfaction of the demands of the large patriarchal family which had hardly any recourse to exchange. The master’s power over his slaves was already unlimited but the sphere of application of slave labour was limited.
The further growth of productive forces, and the development of the social division of labour and of exchange, formed the basis of society’s transition to the slave-owning system.
The advance from stone to metal implements of labour led to a considerable extension of the limits of human labour. The invention of the blacksmith’s bellows enabled man to make iron implements of labour of a durability not seen before. It became possible with the help of the iron axe to clear the land of forests and undergrowth for ploughing. The wooden plough with iron share made it possible to work comparatively large plots of land. Primitive Hunting economy gave place to agriculture and cattle-breeding. Handicrafts appeared.
In agriculture, which remained the main branch of production, methods of tillage and cattle-breeding improved. New branches of agriculture arose; vine and flax growing, the growing of oil crops, and so on. The rich families’ herds increased. More and more working hands were needed to look after the cattle.
Weaving, metal-working, the art of pottery and other crafts gradually improved. Formerly a craft had been a subsidiary occupation of the husbandman or herdsman. Now for many people it became an independent occupation. The separation of handicraft from agriculture took place. This was the second large-scale social division of labour.
With the division of production into two large basic branches, agriculture and handicraft, there arises production directly for exchange though still in an undeveloped form. The growth in productivity of labour led to an increase in the amount of the surplus product which, with private property in the means of production, afforded the opportunity for the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a minority of society, and on this basis for the subordination of the working majority to the exploiting minority, for the conversion of labourers into slaves.
Under conditions of slavery the economy was basically a natural one. A natural economy is one in which the products of labour are not exchanged but consumed within the economy where they were produced. At the same time, however, the development of exchange took place. At first craftsmen made their products to order and then for sale on the market. At the same time, many of them continued for long to have small plots of land and to cultivate them to satisfy their needs. In the main the peasants carried on a natural economy, but were compelled to sell a certain part of their produce on the market in order to be able to buy the craftsman’s wares and to pay money taxes. Thus gradually part of the products of the craftsman’s and peasant’s labour became commodities.
A commodity is a product prepared not for direct consumption but for exchange, for sale on the market. The production of objects for exchange is the characteristic feature of commodity economy. Thus the separation of handicraft from agriculture, the rise of handicraft as an independent occupation, signified the birth of commodity production.
So long as exchange bore a fortuitous character one product of labour was directly exchanged for another. As exchange expanded and became a regular phenomenon, a commodity for which any other commodity would be willingly given gradually emerged. Thus money arose. Money is a universal commodity by which all other commodities are evaluated and which serves as an intermediary in exchange.
The development of handicraft and exchange led to the formation of towns. Towns arose in remote antiquity, at the dawn of the slave-owning mode of production. At first the town was little to be distinguished from the village, but gradually handicraft and trade concentrated in towns. The towns became more and more distinct from villages by the type of occupation of the inhabitants and by their way of life.
Thus began the separation of town from country and the rise of the antithesis between them.
As the quantity of exchangeable commodities increased, the territorial limits of exchange also expanded. Merchants arose who in pursuit of gain purchased commodities from the producers, carried the commodities to markets sometimes quite far from the place of production, and sold them to the consumers.
The expansion of production and exchange considerably intensified inequality of property. Money, working cattle, implements of production and seeds accumulated in the hands of the rich. The poor were compelled more and more frequently to turn to them for loans, mainly in kind, but sometimes also in money. The rich lent them implements of production, seeds and money, making bondsmen of their debtors and, when the latter did not pay their debts, made them slaves and took their land. Thus usury arose. It brought a further growth of riches to some, debt bondage to others.
The land also began to be converted into private property. It began to be sold and mortgaged. If a debtor could not pay the usurer, he had to abandon his land and sell himself and his children into slavery. Sometimes, on one pretext or another, the large landowners seized part of the meadows and pastures from the peasant village communes.
Thus proceeded the concentration of landed property, wealth in money and masses of slaves in the hands of the rich slave-owners. The small peasant economy more and more broke down, while the slave-owning economy grew strong and expanded, spreading to all branches of production.
“The continued increase of production and with it the increased productivity of labour enhanced the value of human labour-power. Slavery, which had been a nascent and sporadic factor in the preceding stage, now became an essential part of the social system. The slaves ceased to be simply assistants, but were now driven in scores to work in the fields and workshops." (Engels, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State"; Marx and Engels, Selected Works, English edition, vol. II, p. 283.)
Slave labour became the basis of society’s existence. Society split into two basically opposed classes, slaves and slave-owners.
Thus the slave-owning mode of production was established.
Under the slave-owning system the population was divided into free men and slaves. The free had all civil, property and political rights (except women, who were essentially in the position of slaves). The slaves were deprived of all these rights and had no right of admission to the ranks of the free. In their turn the free were divided into a class of large landowners, who were also large-scale slave-owners, and a class of small producers (peasants, craftsmen), the well-to-do strata of which also made use of slave labour and were slave-owners. The priests, who played a great part in the period of slavery, were attached, because of their status, to the class of large landowners and slave-owners.
Apart from the class contradiction between slaves and slave-owners there also existed a class contradiction between the large landowners and the peasants. But with the development of the slave-owning system slave labour, as the cheapest, embraced the larger part of the branches of production and became the main basis of production; and the contradiction between slaves and slave-owners became the basic contradiction of society.
Society’s split into classes evoked the necessity for the State. With the growth of social division of labour and the development of exchange, separate clans and tribes came ever closer together and combined into unions. The character of clan institutions was changed. The organs of the clan system more and more lost their popular character. They were converted into organs of dominance over the people, into organs of plunder and oppression of their own and of neighbouring tribes. The elders and military leaders of the clans and tribes became princes and kings. Formerly they had authority as people elected by the clan or union of clans. Now they began to use their power to defend the interests of the propertied upper layer, to keep a grip on their fellow clansmen falling into poverty, and to hold down the slaves. Armed retinues, courts and punitive organs served this end.
Thus State power arose.
“Only when the first form of the division of society into classes appeared, only when slavery appeared, when a certain class of people, by concentrating on the crudest forms of agricultural labour, could produce a certain surplus, when this surplus was not absolutely essential for the most wretched existence of the slave and passed into the hands of the slave-owner when in this way the existence of this class of slave-owners took firm root -and in order that it might take firm root- it was essential that the state should appear." (Lenin, “The State", Selected Works, English edition, vol. XI, p. 647; and in “Lenin and Stalin on the State", Little Lenin Library, vol. XXIII, p. 15.)
The State arose in order to hold in check the exploited majority in the interests of the exploiting minority.
The slave-owning State played a great part in the development and stabilisation of the production relations of slave-owning society. The slave-owning State held the slave masses in subjection. It grew into a widely ramified machinery for domination over and oppression of the masses of the people. The democracy in ancient Greece and Rome which bourgeois history textbooks extol was essentially a slave-owning democracy.
Production Relations of the Slave-Owning System.
Position of Slaves
The production relations of slave-owning society were based on the fact that not only the means of production but also the workers in production, the slaves, were the slave-owners’ property. The slave was considered a chattel.
He was at the complete and utter disposal of his owner. Slaves were not only exploited, they were bought and sold like cattle and were even killed with impunity. While in the period of patriarchal slavery the slave had been regarded as a member of the family, in the conditions of the slave-owning mode of production he was not considered even a man.
“The slave did not sell his labour-power to the slave-owner, any more than the ox sells its services to the peasant. The slave, together with his labour-power, has been sold once and for all to his owner." (Marx, “Wage, Labour and Capital", Selected Works, English edition, vol. I, p. 77.)
Slave labour had an openly compulsory character. Slaves were made to work by means of the crudest physical force. They were driven to work with whips and were subjected to harsh punishments for the least negligence. Slaves were branded so that they could be more easily taken if they fled. Many of them wore permanent iron collars which bore their owner’s name.
The slave-owner acquired the whole product of slave labour. He gave the slaves only the smallest possible quantity of the means of subsistence-sufficient to prevent them dying of hunger and to enable them to go on working for him. The slave-owner took not only the surplus product but also a considerable part of the necessary product of the slaves’ labour.
The development of the slave-owning mode of production was accompanied by an increase in the demand for slaves. In a number of countries slaves as a rule had no family. The rapacious exploitation of slaves led to their rapid physical exhaustion. It was continually necessary to add to the numbers of slaves. War was an important source of obtaining new bondmen. The slave-owning States of the ancient East carried on constant wars with a view to conquering other peoples. The history of ancient Greece is full of wars between separate city States, between metropolis and colonies, between Greek and Oriental States. Rome carried on uninterrupted wars; at her height she conquered the greater part of the lands known at that time. Not only the warriors who had been taken prisoner, but also a considerable part of the population of the conquered lands, were enslaved.
Provinces and colonies served as another source for adding to the numbers of slaves. They supplied the slave-owners with “living commodities" as well as with every other commodity. The slave trade was one of the most profitable and flourishing branches of economic activity. Special centres of the slave trade arose: fairs were arranged to which came traders and buyers from distant countries.
The slave-owning mode of production opened broader opportunities for the growth of productive forces than the primitive community. The concentration of a large number of slaves in the hands of the slave-owning State and of individual slave-owners made possible the use of simple co-operation of labour on a large. scale: This is attested by the gigantic construction works which were executed in antiquity by the peoples of China, India, Egypt, Italy, Greece, Transcaucasia, Central Asia and others: irrigation systems, roads, bridges, military fortifications, cultural monuments.
Social division of labour developed and expressed itself in the specialisation of agricultural and handicraft production, thus creating conditions for raising the productivity of labour.
In Greece slave labour was widely applied in handicraft. Large workshops arose, ergasteria, in which there worked several dozen slaves at a time. Slave labour was also used in building, in mining iron ore, silver and gold. In Rome slave labour was widespread in agriculture. The R()man aristocracy owned broad estates, latifundia, where hundreds and thousands of slaves worked.
These latifundia were created by the seizure of peasants’ lands and also of unoccupied State lands.
The slave-owning latifundia, in consequence of the cheapness of slave labour. and the utilisation of the advantages of simple co-operation, were able to produce grain and other agricultural produce at lower cost than the small farms of the free peasants. The small peasantry was squeezed out, fell into slavery or swelled the ranks of the impoverished sections of the town population, the lumpen-proletariat.
The contradiction between town and country, which had already arisen during the transition from the primitive communal system to the slave-owning system, grew deeper and deeper.
The towns became the centres where the slave-owning nobility, the merchants, the usurers, the officials of the slave-owning State, all of whom exploited the broad masses of the peasant population, were concentrated.
On the basis of slave labour the ancient world achieved considerable economic and cultural development. But the slave-owning system could not create the conditions for any further serious technical progress. Slave labour was distinguished by extremely low productivity. The slave was not at all interested in the results of his labour. The slaves hated their labour under the yoke. Frequently they expressed their protest and indignation by spoiling the implements of labour. Therefore the slaves were given only the crudest implements, which it was difficult to spoil.
The technique of production founded on slavery remained at an exceedingly low level. Despite a certain development of the natural and exact sciences, they were hardly applied at all in production. Certain technical inventions were used only for war purposes and in building. Through the several centuries of its dominance the slave-owning mode of production went no further than the application of manual implements borrowed from the small agriculturalist and craftsman, and no further than simple labour co-operation. The basic motive force remained the physical strength of men and cattle.
The wide application of slave labour allowed the slave owners to free themselves from all physical labour and to transfer it completely to the slaves.
The slave-owners treated physical labour with scorn, considered it an occupation unworthy of a free man and led a parasitic form of life. With the development of slavery greater and greater numbers of the free population broke away from any productive activity. Only a certain part of the slave-owning upper class and of the other free population engaged in public affairs, the sciences and the arts, which attained a considerable level of development.
The slave-owning system gave birth to the antithesis between mental and physical labour, to the gap between them. The exploitation of slaves by slave-owners is the main feature of the production relations of slave-owning society.
At the same time the slave-owning mode of production had its peculiarities in various countries.
In the countries of the ancient East natural economy predominated to a still greater degree than in the ancient world’ of Europe. Here slave labour was widely applied in the State economies and those of the large slave-owners and temples. Domestic slavery was greatly developed. Huge- masses of members of peasant communities were exploited, as well as the slaves, in the agriculture of China, India, Babylonia and Egypt. Here the system of enslavement for debt acquired great importance. The member of the peasant community who did not pay his debt to the usurer, or his rent to the landowner, was compelled to work on their land for a definite time as a bond-slave.
In the slave-owning countries of the ancient East communal and State forms of ownership of land were widespread. The existence of these forms of property was linked with the system of cultivation based on irrigation. Irrigated agriculture in the river valleys of the East demanded enormous labour expenditure for the construction of dams, canals and reservoirs and the draining of marshes. All this evoked the necessity of centralising the construction and use of the irrigation systems over large territories. “Artificial irrigation is here the first condition of agriculture and this is a matter either for the communes, the provinces or ,the central government." (Engels, “Letter to K. Marx", June 6, 1843, Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846-95, 1934, English edition, p.67.) With the development of slavery the communal lands were concentrated in the hands of the State. The king with unlimited power became the supreme owner of the land.
The slave-owners’ State, concentrating in its hands the ownership of land, imposed huge taxes on the peasants, compelled them to carry out different types of duties and thereby put the peasants in a condition of servile dependence. The peasants remained members of the rural community. But with the concentration of the land in the hands of the slave-owning State, the rural community was a firm base for oriental despotism, i.e., the unlimited autocratic power of a despotic monarch. The priestly aristocracy played an important part in the slave-owning States of the East. The great estates belonging to the temples were maintained on the basis of slave labour.
Under the slave-owning system the slave-owners in all countries expended unproductively by far the greater part of slave labour and its products: on the satisfaction of personal fancies, the accumulation of, treasure, the construction of military fortifications and armies, the erection and maintenance of luxurious palaces and temples. In particular the Egyptian pyramids, which have been preserved up to the present day, testify to the unproductive expenditure of huge masses of labour. Only an insignificant part of slave labour and its product was expended on the further expansion of production, which therefore developed exceedingly slowly. Ruinous wars led to the destruction of productive forces, the extermination of huge numbers of the peaceful population and the ruin of the culture of entire States.
The basic economic law of the slave-owning system consists in the production of surplus product to satisfy the demands of the slave-owners, by means of the rapacious exploitation of the slaves, on the basis of full ownership by the slave-owners of the means of production and of the slaves themselves, by the ruining and enslaving of peasants and craftsmen, and also by conquering and enslaving the peoples of other countries.
Further Development of Exchange. Merchants’ and Usurers’ Capital
The slave-owning economy in the main preserved its natural character. In it production was mainly for the direct consumption of the slave-owner, of his numerous hangers-on and retainers, not with a view to exchange. All the same, exchange gradually began to playa more noticeable part, particularly in the period of the greatest development of the slave-owning system. In a number of branches of production a certain part of the products of labour, was regularly sold on the market-that is, was converted into commodities.
With the expansion of exchange the part played by money increased. Usually there arose as money that commodity which was the most frequently exchanged. Among many peoples, particularly among cattle-breeders, cattle first served as money. Among others salt, grain or furs became money.
Gradually all other forms of money were squeezed out by metallic currency.
Metallic currency first appeared in the countries of the ancient East. Money in the form of bronze, silver and gold bars was already circulating here in the third to second millennia B.C., and in the form of coins from the seventh century B.C. In Greece in the eighth century B.C., iron money was current. In Rome even in the fifth to fourth centuries B.C. only copper money was used. Later iron and copper money were replaced by silver and gold.
The Greek city States carried on quite far-flung trade, including trade with the Greek colonies scattered along the shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The colonies regularly supplied the basic labour force-slaves-and certain forms of raw material and foodstuffs: hides, wool, cattle, grain and fish.
In Rome, as well as in Greece, apart from trade in slaves and other commodities, trade in luxury objects played a great part. These commodities were supplied from the East mainly in the shape of all sorts of tribute taken from conquered peoples. Trade was connected with plunder, piracy and the enslavement of colonies.
Under the slave-owning system money had already become not only a means of buying and selling commodities; it had also come to serve as a means for the appropriation of the labour of others by means of trade and usury. Money expended with a view to appropriating surplus labour and its product becomes capital, that is, a means of exploitation. Merchants’ and usurers’ capital were historically the first forms of capital. Merchants’ capital is capital engaged in the sphere of commodity exchange. Merchants buying up and reselling commodities appropriated a considerable part of the surplus product created by the slaves, small peasants and craftsmen. Usurers’ capital is capital applied in the form of loans of money, means of production or objects of consumption for the appropriation of the peasants’ and craftsmen’s surplus labour by means of high interest rates. The usurers also granted money loans to the slave-owning aristocracy, thus sharing in the surplus product that the latter received.
Sharpening of the Contradictions of the Slave-Owning Mode of Production
Slavery was an essential stage on mankind’s road of development.
“It was slavery that first made possible the division of labour between agriculture and industry on a considerable scale, and along with this, the flower of the ancient world, Hellenism. Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science; without slavery, no Roman Empire. But without Hellenism and the Roman Empire as a basis, also no modern Europe." (Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1934, English edition, p. 203.)
On the bones of generations of slaves there arose a culture which was the basis for mankind’s further development. Many branches of knowledge-mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, architecture-achieved considerable development in the ancient world. The artistic objects which have corrie down to us from antiquity, the works of literature, sculpture and architecture have entered for ever into the treasury of human culture.
The slave-owning system, however, concealed in itself insuperable contradictions which led to its destruction. The slave-owning form of exploitation constantly destroyed the basic productive force of this society, the slaves. The struggle of the slaves against harsh forms of exploitation was more and more frequently expressed in armed risings. An uninterrupted influx of slaves and their cheapness were a condition of existence for slave-owning economy. Slaves were mainly supplied by war. The mass of free small producers, the peasants and craftsmen, formed the basis of the military power of slave-owning society. They served in the armed forces and bore On their shoulders the main burden of taxes essential for conducting war. But as a result of the competition of large-scale production based on cheap slave labour, and under the weight of burdens beyond their strength, the peasants and craftsmen were ruined. The insoluble contradiction between large latifundia and peasant farms continued to intensify.
The squeezing out of the free peasantry subverted not only the economic, but also the military and political might of the slave-owning States, and particularly Rome. Victories were replaced by defeats. Wars of conquest were replaced by defensive ones. The source of the uninterrupted supply of cheap slaves dried up. The negative aspects of slave labour appeared more and more strongly. A general fall in production took place in the last two centuries of the existence of the Roman Empire. Trade fell http confusion, formerly rich lands became poor, the population began to decline, crafts perished and towns began to be deserted.
The productive relations based on slave labour had turned into fetters for the expanded productive forces of society. The labour of slaves, completely uninterested in the results of production, had outlived itself. There had arisen the historical necessity for the replacement of slave-owning production relations by other production relations, which would change the situation in society. of the main productive force, the labouring masses. The law of the obligatory correspondence between production relations and the character of the productive forces demanded the replacement of slaves by workers who were to some extent interested in the results of their labour.
As large-scale slave-owning production became economically unprofitable the slave-owners began to set free considerable groups of slaves whose labour no longer brought them any income. Large estates were broken into small plots. These plots were handed over on definite conditions, either to former slaves who had been set free, or to formerly free citizens who were now obliged to bear a number of duties for the benefit of the landowner. The new tillers of the soil were bound to the plots of land, and could be sold together with them. But they were no longer slaves.
This was a new social stratum of small-scale producers, occupying an intermediary position between free and slave, and having a certain interest in the results of their own labour. They were called coloni, and were the predecessors of the medieval serfs.
Thus the elements of a new, feudal mode of production were born in the womb of slave-owning society.
Class Struggle of the Exploited against the Exploiters.
Slave Revolts. Downfall of the Slave-Owning System
The history of slave-owning societies in the countries of the ancient East, in Greece and Rome shows that with the development of the slave-owning economy the class struggle of the enslaved masses against their oppressors.
was intensified. Slave revolts were linked with the struggle of the exploited small peasants against the slave-owning upper class, the large landowners.
The contradiction between small producers and large well-born landowners gave birth already at an early stage in the development of slave-owning society to a democratic movement among the free men which set itself the aim of destroying debt bondage, the redivision of lands, the abolition of the prerogatives of the landed aristocracy and the transfer of power to the demos (that is, to the people).
Of the numerous slave risings in the Roman Empire that led by Spartacus (74-71 B.C.) was particularly remarkable. The most vivid page in the history of the slaves’ struggle against the slave-owners is linked with his name.
Slave risings flared up more than once throughout many centuries. Impoverished peasants joined the slaves. These risings achieved particular force in the second to first centuries B.C. and in the third to fifth centuries A.D. The slave-owners suppressed the risings with the fiercest measures.
The risings of the exploited masses, primarily of the slaves, radically undermined the former might of Rome. Blows from inside began more and more to be interconnected with blows from outside. The inhabitants of neighbouring lands who had been enslaved revolted in the fields of Italy, while at the same time their fellow-tribesmen who had remained free stormed the frontiers of the Empire, broke into its territories and destroyed Roman supremacy. These circumstances hastened the downfall of the slave-owning system in Rome.
The slave-owning mode of production achieved its greatest development in the Roman Empire. The fall of the Roman Empire was also the fall of the slave-owning system as a whole. The feudal system took the place of the slave-owning system.
Economic Views of the Slave-Owning Period
The economic views of the slave-owning period were reflected in many literary works left by poets, philosophers, historians, statesmen and public figures. In the view of these men, a slave was considered not a person but a chattel in his master’s hands. Slave labour was scorned. And since labour became predominantly the lot of slaves, there followed scorn for labour in general, as activity unworthy of a free person.
The code of laws of the Babylonian king Hammurabi (eighteenth century B.C.) provides evidence of the economic views of slave-owning Babylonia. The code defends the property and personal rights of the rich and noble slave-owners and landowners. According to the code whoever concealed a runaway slave was punished with death. A peasant who did not pay his debt to the moneylender, or his rent to the landowner, had to give his wife, son or daughter into bond slavery until he had worked off the debt. In the ancient Indian collection “The Code of Manu" social, religious and moral injunctions sanctifying slavery are expounded. According to these laws a slave had no property. The law punished with death anyone who “gave shelter to a runaway slave".
The views of the ruling classes were reflected in religion. Thus, in India Buddhism became widespread beginning from the sixth century B.C. Proclaiming acceptance of reality, non-resistance to violence and humility before the ruling classes, Buddhism was a religion of use to the slave-owning aristocracy which they used to strengthen their domination.
Even the outstanding thinkers of antiquity could not imagine the existence of society without slavery. .For example, the Greek philosopher Plato (fifth to fourth centuries B.C.) wrote the first Utopia in the history of mankind about an ideal social system. But even in his ideal State he retained slaves. The labour of slaves, tillers of the soil and artisans, had to supply the means of existence for the higher class of rulers and warriors.
In the eyes of the greatest thinker of antiquity, Aristotle" (fourth century B.C.), slavery was also an eternal and inevitable necessity for society. Aristotle greatly influenced the development of thought in the ancient world and in the middle ages. Though he rose high above the level of contemporary society in his scientific conjectures and anticipations, on the question of slavery Aristotle remained a prisoner of the conceptions of his age. His views on slavery amounted to the following: for the helmsman the rudder is an inanimate instrument, but the slave is an animate instrument. If implements performed their work to order, if, for example, shuttles wove of themselves, there would be no need for slaves. But since in economic life there existed many occupations demanding simple unskilled labour, Nature had made wise provision, by creating slaves. In Aristotle’s opinion Nature itself had ordained that some men should be slaves and that others should rule them. Slave labour supplied free men with leisure for perfecting themselves. Hence, he concluded, the whole art of the master consisted in knowing how to use his slaves.
Aristotle gave to the science of management of resources the name “oikonomia". In his lifetime exchange, trade and usury were quite widely developed, but the economy basically preserved its natural character, producing for consumption within its own framework. Aristotle considered natural the acquisition of benefits only by means of agriculture and handicrafts; he was a partisan of natural economy. However, Aristotle also understood the nature of exchange.
He found exchange with a view to consumption completely natural “because usually people have more of certain objects and fewer of others than is essential for the satisfaction of their needs". He understood the necessity for money for exchange.
At the same time Aristotle considered that trade with a view to profit, and usury, were reprehensible occupations. He pointed out that these occupations, as distinct from agriculture and handicraft, knew no limits to the acquisition of wealth.
The ancient Greeks already had a certain conception of the division of labour and the part it played in the life of society. Thus Plato envisaged division of labour as the basic principle of the State system in his ideal republic.
The economic conceptions of the Romans also reflected the relations of the prevailing slave-owning mode of production.
Roman writers and public men, expressing the ideology of the slave-owners, counted slaves as simple implements of production; It is to the Roman encyclopaedist Varro (first century B.C.) who composed, among a number of other books, a sort of handbook for slave-owners on the conduct of agriculture, that we owe the well-known division of implements into (1) the dumb (carts); (2) those which utter inarticulate sounds (cattle); and (3) those gifted with speech (slaves). In giving this definition he was expressing views generally accepted among slave-owners.
The minds of Rome, as well as of Greece, were concerned with the art of managing slaves.
Plutarch (first to second century A.D.), the historian of the Roman era, tells of the “model" slave-owner Cato and how he bought slaves young “that is at the age when, like puppies and foals, they can be readily subjected to education and training". Later he says that “among the slaves he constantly invented methods of maintaining quarrels and disputes, for he considered agreement among them dangerous and feared it".
In ancient Rome, especially in the later period, breakdown and decay of the economy founded on the compulsory labour of slaves grew worse and worse. The Roman writer Columella (first century A.D.) complained: “The slaves do the greatest harm to the fields. They lend the oxen ‘on the side’. They also pasture the other stock badly. They plough the land poorly." His contemporary Pliny the Elder said that “the latifundia have destroyed Italy and its provinces".
Like the Greeks, the Romans considered normal the natural form of economy, in which the master exchanges only his surpluses. Sometimes in the literature of that time high trading profits and usurious rates of interest were condemned. In reality, however, the merchants and usurers accumulated enormous fortunes.
In the last period of the existence of the slave-owning system voices could be already heard condemning slavery and proclaiming the natural equality of men. These views, understandably, met with no sympathy among the ruling class of slave-owners. As for the slaves, they were so crushed by their servitude, so downtrodden and ignorant, that they were unable to work out an ideology of their own more progressive than the obsolete ideas of the slave-owning class. This is one of the causes of the spontaneity and unorganised character of the slave revolts.
One of the sharp contradictions inherent in the slave-owning system was the struggle between large and small land-holders. The impoverished peasantry put forward the demand for the limitation of the landed property of the great slave-owners and the re-allocation of lands.
This was the essence of the agrarian reform for which the brothers Gracchi struggled (second century B.C.).
In the period of the decline of the Roman Empire when an absolute majority of the population of town and country, both slaves and free, saw no way out of the situation, there developed a severe crisis in the ideology of slave-owning Rome.
A new religious ideology, Christianity, emerged on the basis of the class contradictions of the dying Empire. The Christianity of that period expressed the protest of slaves, of the ruined masses of the peasantry and craftsmen, and of declassed elements, against slavery and oppression. On the other hand, Christianity reflected the mood of broad strata of the ruling classes, who sensed the utter hopelessness of their situation. That is why, in the Christianity of the decline of the Roman Empire, by the side of grim warnings to the rich and powerful, there are also calls to humility and to seek salvation in life beyond the grave.
In the following centuries Christianity finally became the religion of the ruling classes, a spiritual weapon for the defence and justification of the exploitation and oppression of the labouring masses.
BRIEF CONCLUSIONS
(1) The slave-owning mode of production arose thanks to the growth of the productive forces of society, the appearance of a surplus product, the origin of private property in the means of production, including land, and the appropriation of the surplus product by the owners of the means of production.
Slavery is the first and crudest form of the exploitation of man by man. The slave was the full and unlimited property of his master. The slave-owner, at his will, commanded not only the slave’s labour, but also his life.
(2) The State first took shape with the rise or the slave-owning system. It arose, as a result of the splitting of society into irreconcilably hostile classes, as the machine for suppressing the exploited majority of society by the exploiting minority.
(3) Slave-owning economy was in the main of a natural character. The ancient world broke down into numerous separate economic units satisfying their requirements by their own production. Trade was mainly in slaves and luxury articles. The development of exchange gave rise to metallic currency.
(4) The basic economic law of the slave-owning mode of production consists in the production of surplus product, to satisfy the demands of the slave-owners, by the rapacious exploitation of the slaves on the basis of full ownership by the slave-owners of the means of production and the slaves themselves, by the ruining and enslaving of peasants and craftsmen, and also by conquering and enslaving the peoples of other countries.
(5) A comparatively high culture (art, philosophy, the sciences) arose on the basis of slavery. Its fruits were enjoyed by the small upper class of slave-owning society. The social consciousness of the ancient world corresponded to the mode of production based on slavery. The ruling classes and their ideologists did not consider the slave a man. Physical labour, being the lot of the slaves, was considered a shameful occupation, unworthy of a free man.
(6) The slave-owning mode of production caused an increase in the productive forces of society compared with the primitive communal system.
But later the labour of the slaves, who were completely without interest in the results of production, outlived its usefulness. The spread of slave labour and the lack of any legal protection whatsoever for the slaves resulted in the destruction of the basic productive force of society-the labour force-and the ruin of the small free producers-the peasants and artisans. This ‘predetermined the inevitable downfall of the slave-owning system.
(7) Slave revolts shook the slave-owning system and hastened its destruction. The feudal mode of production came to replace the slave-owning mode of production; instead of the slave-owning form of exploitation there arose the feudal form of exploitation, which gave some scope for the further, development of the productive forces of society.
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III. The Feudal Mode of ProductionRise of Feudalism
The feudal system existed, with particular features of one sort or another, in almost all countries.
The era of feudalism covers a long period. In China the feudal system existed for more than two thousand years. In Western Europe feudalism covers a number of centuries, from the time of the fall of the Roman Empire (fifth century) to the bourgeois revolution in England (seventeenth century) and in France (eighteenth century); in Russia from the ninth century to the peasant reform of 1861; in Transcaucasia from the fourth century to the seventies of the nineteenth century; among the peoples of Central Asia from the seventh or eighth centuries right up to the victory of the proletarian revolution in Russia.
In Western Europe feudalism arose out of the breakdown of Roman slave-owning society, on the one hand, and the decay of the tribal system of the conquering tribes, on the other; it was established as a result of the interaction of these two processes.
Elements of feudalism, as has already been said, had originated in the womb of slave-owning society in the form of the system of coloni. The coloni were obliged to work the land of their master, the large landowner, to make him a definite money payment or hand over a considerable share of the harvest, and to fulfil various types of duty. Nevertheless, the coloni had more interest in their labour than the slaves, since they had their own holdings.
Thus there arose new productive relations which achieved full development in the feudal period.
Tribes of Germans, Gauls, Slavs and other peoples living in different parts of Europe destroyed the Roman Empire. The slave-owners’ power was overthrown and slavery fell. The large latifundia and handicraft workshops based on slave labour broke down. The population of the former Roman Empire consisted of large landowners (former slave-owners, who had adopted the system of coloni), freed slaves, coloni, small peasants and artisans.
The conquering tribes, at the time of the subjugation of Rome, had a communal system which was in decline. The village community, which the Germans called the mark, played a great part in the social life of these tribes.
The land, except for the large landed possessions of the clan nobility, was common property. The forests, heaths, pastures and ponds were used in common. Fields and meadows were re-divided every few years among the members of the community. Gradually, however, the land around the homestead, and later also the ploughland, began to be inherited by separate families. The distribution of land, the investigation of matters concerning the community, the settlement of disputes between its members, were dealt with by the community meeting and by the elders and judges elected by it. At the head of the conquering tribes stood their military leaders who, together with their retinues, held considerable tracts of land.
The tribes which conquered the Roman Empire acquired a great part of its State lands and some part of the lands of the large proprietors. Forests, meadows and pastures remained in common use, but the ploughland was divided into separate holdings. Later the divided lands became the private property of the peasants. Thus a broad stratum of independent small peasantry was formed.
The peasants, however, were unable to preserve their independence for long. Property inequality between different members of the village community inevitably developed on the basis of private ownership of land and ‘other means of production. Well-to-do and poor families appeared among the peasants. With the growth of property inequality members of the community who had grown rich began to acquire power over the community. The land was more and more concentrated in the hands of the rich families, the clan aristocracy and military leaders. The peasants fell into personal dependence on the large landowners.
The conquest of the Roman Empire hastened the break-up of the clan system among the conquering tribes.
In order to maintain and strengthen their power over the dependent peasants the large landowners had to reinforce the organs of State power.
Military leaders, relying on the clan aristocracy and the members of their retinues, began to concentrate power in their hands and became kings-monarchical rulers.
A number of new States headed by kings were formed on the ruins of the Roman Empire. The kings generously handed out the land they had seized for the lifetime and afterwards for the hereditary possession of their attendants, who had to bear military service in return. The Church, which served as an important support for the royal power, received much land. The land was worked by peasants who now had to fulfil a number of duties for their new masters. Huge landholdings passed into the hands of members of the royal retinue and servants, the clerical authorities and the monasteries.
The lands distributed on such conditions were called feods (fiefs). Hence comes the name of the new social structure, feudalism.
The gradual conversion of peasant land into the property of feudal lords and the enserfment of the peasant masses (the process of feudalisation) took place in Europe in the course of a number of centuries (from the fifth or sixth to the ninth or tenth centuries). The free peasantry was ruined by incessant military service, plunder and impositions. Turning for help to the large landowner, the peasants converted themselves into his dependents. Frequently the peasants were compelled to yield themselves into the “protection" of the feudal lord; otherwise it was impossible for a defenceless man to exist in conditions of ceaseless wars and bandit raids. In such cases property rights in the plot of land passed to the feudal lord, and the peasant could work his plot only on condition of fulfilling various duties for the lord. In other cases the royal lieutenants and officials, by means of deceit and force, appropriated the land of free peasants, making the latter acknowledge their power.
In different countries the process of feudalisation took different courses, but the essence of the matter was everywhere the same: the formerly free peasants fell into personal dependence on the feudal lords who had seized their land. Sometimes this dependence’ was weaker, sometimes stronger. In course of time the differences in the position of former slaves, coloni and free peasants disappeared, and they were all converted into a single mass of peasant serfs. Gradually there was established the’ position which is described by the medieval phrase: “No land without its lord." (i.e.) without its feudal master). The kings were the supreme landowners.
Feudalism was an essential stage in the historical development of society.
Slavery had outlived itself. In these circumstances the further development of productive forces was only possible on the basis of the labour of the mass of dependent peasantry, possessing their own holdings, their own implements of production and having some interest in labour.
As the history of mankind testifies, however, it is not obligatory that every people should pass through all stages of social development. For many peoples conditions arise under which they have the possibility of missing one stage of development or another and of passing immediately to a higher stage.
In Russia patriarchal slavery arose when the primitive community was breaking down. The development of society here, however, went in the main not along the road of slave-owning, but of feudalisation. The Slavonic tribes, even when the clan system was predominant among them, beginning from the third century A.D., attacked the Roman slave-owning Empire, struggled to free the towns of the northern Black Sea coast which were in its power and played a great part in the overthrow of the slave-owning system. The transition from the primitive community to feudalism-took place in Russia at a time when the slave-owning system had long since fallen in the countries of Western Europe, and when feudal relations had been stabilised there.
The village community among the Eastern Slavs was called verv or mir. The community had meadows, forests and ponds in common use, but the ploughland began to pass into the possession of separate families. An elder was at the head of the community. The development of private landowning led to the gradual breakdown of the village communities. The elders and tribal princes seized the land. The peasants (smerds) were at first free members of the community, but later fell into dependence on the large landowners (boyars).
The Church became the largest feudal owner. Grants by the princes, endowments and legacies made it the possessor of broad lands and the richest estates of those times. In the period of the formation of the centralised Russian State (fifteenth to sixteenth centuries) t9-e Grand Princes and Tsars began to “place" (Russian, pomeshchat) their attendants and serving people on the land, i.e., to give them land and peasants on condition of their owing military service. Hence the names pomest’e (fee or estate) and pomeshchik (lord of the manor).
At that time the peasants were not yet finally bound to the landowner and the land; they had the right to transfer from one lord to another. At the end of the sixteenth century the lords, with a view to increasing the production of grain for sale, intensified their exploitation of the peasants. In connection with this the State in 1581 deprived the peasants of the right of transfer from one landlord to another. The peasants were completely bound to the land belonging to the lords and were thus converted into serfs.
In the period of feudalism agriculture played a predominant part and tillage was its most important branch. Gradually, in the course of a number of centuries, methods of grain-growing improved and market gardening, fruit-growing, vine-growing and butter-making developed.
In the early period of feudalism the fallow system predominated, but in forested regions the “slash and burn" system of tillage predominated. A plot of land was sown several years consecutively with some crop until the soil was exhausted. Then they transferred to another plot. Later an advance to the “three-field" system took place; in this the arable was divided into three fields of which in turn, one was used for winter crops, the second for spring crops and the third remained fallow. The three-field system began to spread in Western Europe between the ninth and the tenth and in Russia from the eleventh and twelfth centuries onwards: It remained dominant throughout many centuries, being preserved until the nineteenth century and, in many countries, even to the present time.
Agricultural equipment in the early period of feudalism was poor. The primitive wooden plough (sokha) with iron share, the sickle, scythe and spade served as implements of labour. Later, the iron plough and harrow began to be used. The grinding of grain was for a long time carried out by hand, until wind and water mills became widespread.
Production Relations of Feudal Society.
Exploitation of Peasants by Feudal Lords
The property of the feudal lords in land and their incomplete property rights over the peasant serf were the basis of the production relations of feudal society. The peasant serf was not a slave. He had his own holding. The feudal lord could no longer kill him, but he could sell him. By the side of the property of the feudal lords there also existed the individual property of peasants and craftsmen in their implements of production and in their private holdings, based on personal labour.
Large-scale feudal landed property was the basis for the exploitation of peasants by the lords. The feudal lord sown demesne occupied part of the land.
The feudal lord granted another part of the land on extortionate conditions for use by the peasants. The lord allotted land to the peasants to “hold", hence the expression “holding". The peasant holding was the means by which the lord secured his labour force. With hereditary possession of his holding, the peasant was obliged to work for the lord to till the lord’s soil with the help of his own implements and stock, or else to give the lord his surplus product in kind or in money.
Such a system of economy inevitably presupposed the peasants’ personal dependence on the landlord-a system of extra-economic compulsion. “If the lord had not had direct power over the person of the peasant he would not have been able to compel to work for him a man who possessed land and tilled on his own account." (Lenin, “Development of Capitalism in Russia", Works, fourth Russian edition, vol. III, p. 159.).
The peasant serf’s working time was divided into necessary and surplus time. During the necessary time, the peasant created the product necessary for his own existence and the existence of his family. During the surplus time he created the surplus product which was appropriated by the lord. The surplus labour of the peasant who worked on the lord’s demesne, or the surplus product created by the peasant in his own holding and appropriated by the lord, constitute feudal land-rent.
Feudal rent frequently swallowed up not only the peasant’s surplus labour, but also part of his necessary labour. The basis of this rent was feudal ownership of land, linked with the direct domination of the feudal lord over the peasants dependent on him.
Under feudalism there existed three forms of land-rent: labour-rent, rent in kind and money-rent. In all these forms of rent the exploitation of the peasants by the landlords stood out in unconcealed form.
Labour-rent, or “week-work" (barshchina), predominated in the early stages of feudalism’s development. Under the system of week-work the peasant worked for a specified part of the week, three or more days, with his own implements of production (plough, draught animals, etc.) on his master’s estate and the remaining days worked on his own holding. Thus by week-work the necessary and surplus labour of the peasant were clearly distinguished in time and space. The sphere covered by week-work was exceedingly broad. The peasant ploughed, sowed and gathered the harvest, pastured cattle, worked as a carpenter, chopped timber for the lord, and carted agricultural produce and building materials using his own horse.
Under the week-work system the peasant serf was interested in raising the productivity of labour only while working on his own holding. When working on the lord’s land the peasant had no such interest. The feudal lord kept overseers who compelled the peasants to work.
In the course of further development labour-rent was replaced by rent in kind, or quitrent paid in produce. Under this system the peasant was obliged to deliver regularly to the lord a definite quantity of grain, cattle, poultry and other agricultural produce. Most frequently the quitrent was combined with remnants of week-work duties, i.e., with the peasant’s work on the lord’s demesne.
With rent in kind the peasant expended the whole of his labour both necessary and surplus, according to his own discretion. Necessary and surplus labour were no longer divided as clearly as with labour-rent. Here the peasant became relatively more independent. This created a certain stimulus to further raising the productivity of labour.
At a later stage of feudalism, when exchange had become comparatively widespread, money-rent arose, or quitrent in money. Money-rent is characteristic of the period of the breakdown of feudalism and the appearance of capitalist relations. Various forms of feudal-rent often existed simultaneously.
“In all these forms of ground-rent, whether labour-rent, rent in kind, or money-rent (as a mere change of form of rent in kind), the rent-paying party is always supposed to be the actual tiller and possessor of the land, whose unpaid surplus labour passes directly into the hands of the landlord." (Marx, Capital, Kerr edition, vol. III, p. 932.)
Striving to increase their income, the feudal lords imposed every sort of exaction on the peasant. In many cases they had monopolistic possession of mills, smithies and other enterprises. The peasant was compelled to use them for exceedingly high payments in kind or money. Apart from quitrent in kind or money paid to the feudal lord, the peasant had to pay all sorts of imposts to the State, local taxes and, in some countries, a tithe, i.e., a tenth of the harvest to the Church.
Thus the labour of peasant serfs was the basis of the existence of feudal society. Peasants not only grew agricultural produce. They worked in the feudal lord’s estates as craftsmen, erected castles and monasteries and made roads.
Towns were built by the hands of peasant serfs.
The economy of the feudal lords, particularly in the early stages of its development, was basically a natural economy. Each feudal estate, consisting of the lord’s demesne and the villages belonging to him, lived an isolated economic life, rarely engaging in exchange. The requirements of the feudal lord and his family, and the needs of the numerous house hold were at first satisfied by the produce from the seigniorial economy and supplied by the peasants paying quitrent. Fairly large estates had a sufficient quantity of craftsmen, mostly among the household serfs. These craftsmen made clothing and footwear, made and repaired weapons, hunting equipment and agricultural implements, and erected buildings.
The peasant economy was also a natural one. The peasants engaged not only in agricultural labour but also in domestic handicraft, mainly working up raw materials produced in their holdings-spinning, weaving, making footwear and farm implements.
For a long time a characteristic of feudalism was the combination of agriculture, as the basic branch of the economy, with domestic handicraft, which was auxiliary to it. The few imported products without which it was impossible to manage, as for example, salt and articles of iron, were at first supplied by wandering traders. Later, in connection with the growth of towns and handicraft, the division of labour and development of exchange between town and country made a great step forward.
The exploitation of dependent peasants by feudal lords was the main feature of feudalism among all peoples. However, in particular countries the feudal system had its own special features. In countries of the East feudal relations were for a long time combined with slave relations. Thus it was in China, India, Japan and a number of other countries. Feudal State property in land was of great significance in the East. For example, in the period of the Bagdad Khalifate, under the dominance of the Arabs (particularly in the eighth to ninth centuries A.D.), a large section of the members of peasant communities lived on the Khalif’s land and paid feudal-rent direct to the State. Feudalism in the East was also characterised by the vitality of patriarchal clan relations which were utilised by the feudal lords as a means of intensifying exploitation of the peasants.
In the agricultural lands of the East, where irrigated agriculture is of decisive significance, the peasants were in bondage to the feudal lords because not only the land but also the water resources and irrigation works were the property of the feudal State or of individual feudal lords. Among nomad peoples the land was used as pasture. The size of feudal land-owning was determined by the quantity of cattle. The large cattle-owning feudalists were, in fact, large-scale owners of pasture. They held the peasantry in dependence and exploited them.
The basic economic law of feudalism consisted in the production of surplus product to satisfy the demands of the feudal lords, by means of the exploitation of dependent peasants on the basis of the ownership of the land by the feudal lords and their incomplete ownership of the workers in production-the serfs.
The Medieval Town. Craft Guilds. Merchant Guilds
Towns had already arisen under the slave-owning system. Such towns as Rome, Florence, Venice and Genoa in Italy; Constantinople and Alexandria in the Near East; Paris, Lyons and Marseilles in France; London in England; Samarkand in Central Asia, and many others, were inherited by the Middle Ages from the epoch of slavery. The slave-owning system fell, but towns remained. The large slave-owning workshops broke down, but the crafts continued to exist.
In the period of the early Middle Ages the towns and crafts developed slowly.
Town craftsmen produced articles for sale, but a large part of the objects of consumption which they needed they obtained from their own holdings. Many of them had small ploughlands, gardens and cattle. The women engaged in the spinning of flax and wool to make clothing. This showed the limited extent of markets and exchange.
In the, countryside the working up of agricultural raw material was at first a subsidiary occupation of the husbandman. Then, from among the peasants there began to emerge craftsmen who served their own village. The craftsmen’s productivity of labour increased. It became possible to produce more articles than were necessary for the feudal lord or the peasants of one village. The craftsmen began to settle around feudal castles, at the walls of monasteries, in large villages and other trading centres. Thus, gradually, usually on the waterways, new towns arose (in Russia, for example, Kiev, Pskov, Novgorod, Vladimir). In the course of time crafts became a more and more profitable business. The skill of the craftsman was perfected. The feudal lord began to buy the product of handicraft from the townsmen. He was no longer satisfied with the work of his own serfs. The more developed crafts were finally isolated from agriculture.
The towns which had arisen on the lands of lay and clerical feudal lords were subject to their authority. Townsmen owed a number of duties to the feudal lord, paid him quitrent in kind or money, and were subject to his administration and court. The town population very soon began the struggle for freedom from feudal dependence. Partly by force, partly by means of purchase, the towns obtained for themselves the right of self-administration, holding courts, minting coinage and collecting taxes.
The town population consisted mainly of craftsmen and traders. In many towns serfs fleeing from their landlords found refuge. The town acted as the centre of commodity production, as distinct from the countryside where natural economy prevailed. The growth of competition from the fugitive serfs who had crowded into the towns, the struggle against exploitation and oppression by the feudal lords, caused the craftsmen to unite into guilds. The guild system existed in the feudal period in almost all countries.
Guilds arose in Byzantium and Italy in the ninth and tenth centuries, and later in the whole of “Western Europe and Russia. In the countries of the East (Egypt, China), and in the towns of the Arab Khalifate guilds arose even earlier than in the European countries. The guilds united the town craftsmen of one specific trade or several similar ones. Only the master craftsmen were full members of the guilds. The master craftsmen had a small number of journeymen and apprentices. The guilds carefully preserved the exclusive right of their members to engage in that craft and regulated the process of production: they laid down the length of the working day, the number of journeymen and apprentices with each master defined the quality of raw materials and finished products and their prices, and frequently purchased raw material in common. Methods of work established by long tradition were obligatory for all. Strict regulation had as its aim the prevention of any single master from raising himself above the others. Apart from this the guilds served as mutual aid organisations.
The guilds were a feudal form of craft organisation. In the first period of their existence they played a certain positive part in assisting the strengthening and development of urban crafts. However, with the growth of commodity production and the expansion of the market, the guilds gradually became a brake on the development of productive forces.
The strict regulation of craft production by the guilds fettered the craftsmen’s initiative and hindered the development of technique. In order to limit competition the guilds began to create all sorts of hindrances to those wishing to receive the rights of a master. For the apprentices and journeymen, whose numbers had considerably increased, the possibility of becoming independent masters had practically ceased. They were compelled to remain for their whole life in the position of hired wage workers. In, these conditions the relations between a master and his subordinates lost their former more or less patriarchal character. The masters intensified the exploitation of their subordinates, making them work fourteen to sixteen hours a day for insignificant pay. The journeymen began to unite into secret brotherhoods to defend their interests. The guilds and town authorities persecuted the journeymen’s brotherhoods in every way.
The richest section of the town population were the merchants. Trading activity developed both in the towns surviving from the period of slavery and in the towns which arose under feudalism. The organisation of guilds in the crafts found their counterpart in the organisation of guilds in trade. Merchant guilds in the feudal period existed almost everywhere. In the East they are known from the ninth century, in Western Europe from the ninth or tenth century, and in Russia from the twelfth century. The basic task of the merchant guilds was the struggle with competition from outside merchants, the regulation of weights and measures, the defence of merchants’ rights from the infringements of the feudal lords.
In the ninth to tenth centuries there already existed considerable trade between the countries of the East and Western Europe. Kievan Rus [1] took an active part in this trade. The Crusades (eleventh to thirteenth centuries) played a great part in the expansion of trade, opening the Near Eastern markets for Western European merchants. A flood of gold and silver from the East swept into Europe. Money began to appear in places where it had formerly not been used. The Italian towns, particularly Genoa and Venice, which carried the crusaders to the East in their trading vessels and supplied them with provisions, took a direct part in the conquest of Eastern markets.
For a long time the Mediterranean ports were the main centres of the trade linking Western Europe with the East. But apart from this, trade developed widely in the north German and Netherland towns scattered along the trade routes of the North and Baltic Seas. Here in the fourteenth century there arose a commercial union of towns, the German Hansa, which united in the following two centuries about eighty towns of various European countries. The Hanseatic League carried on trade with England, Scandinavia, Poland and Russia. In exchange for the growth of towns and development of trade greatly influenced the feudal countryside. The economy of the feudal lords began to be drawn into the market. In order to purchase luxury objects and articles of town crafts the feudal lords needed money. In connection with this it was convenient for the feudal lords to transfer. the peasants from week-work and quitrent in kind to money quitrent. Feudal exploitation was still further intensified with the transfer to money quitrents. The contradiction between town and country which had arisen under slavery became still more acute.
Classes and Estates of Feudal Society.
The Feudal Hierarchy Feudal society was divided into two basic classes, feudal lords and peasants.
“Feudal society represented a division of classes under which the vast majority-the peasant serfs-were completely subjected to an insignificant minority-the landlords, who owned the land." (Lenin, “The State", Selected Works, English edition, vol. XI, p. 651.
The class of feudal lords was not a uniform whole. Petty feudal lords paid tribute to those more powerful, helped them in war, but on the other hand took advantage of their patronage. The patron was called the baron or seigneur, and the one patronised the vassal (vavassar). The barons (seigneurs), in their turn, were vassals of still greater barons or lords (tenantsin-chief). Thus the feudal hierarchy was formed.
As the ruling class, the feudal lords stood at the head of the State. They formed one estate, the baronage (nobility, lords). The lords held the honourable position of first estate and had wide political and economic privileges.
The clergy (Church and monastic) was also a very large landowner. It held extensive lands with a numerous dependent and serf population and was the ruling estate together with the nobles.
The broad base of the “feudal ladder" was the peasantry. The peasants were subordinate to the landowner and were under the supreme power of the most powerful feudal lord, the king. The peasantry was an estate without political rights. The landlords were able to sell their serfs and made wide use of this right. The serf-owners subjected the peasants to physical punishment. Lenin called serfdom “serf slavery". The exploitation of peasant serfs was almost as cruel as the exploitation of slaves in the ancient world. Nevertheless, the serf could work part of the time on his own holding and could, to a certain degree, be independent.
The contradiction between feudal lords and peasant serfs was the basic class contradiction of feudal society. The struggle of the exploited peasantry against the feudal lords was carried on throughout the whole period of feudalism and assumed particular intensity at the end of this period, when serf exploitation had been intensified to extremes.
In the towns freed from feudal dependence power was in the hands of the rich townsmen-merchants, usurers, owners of town lands and large house-owners. The artisans of the various crafts who formed the main mass of the town population, often stood out against the town nobility, winning their participation in the town administration together with the town aristocracy. The small craftsmen and journeymen struggled against the master craftsmen and merchants who were exploiting them.
By the end of the feudal period the town population was already considerably stratified. On the one hand, there were rich merchants and master craftsmen, on the other a broad mass of journeymen and apprentices, the town poor. The lower classes of the towns entered into the struggle against the united forces of the town nobility and feudal lords. This struggle fused into a single stream with the struggle of the peasant serfs against feudal exploitation.
The kings (in Russia the Grand Princes and later the Tsars) were considered the holders of supreme power. Beyond the boundaries of their own holdings, however, the significance of the kings’ power in the period of early feudalism was insignificant. Frequently this power remained nominal. The whole of Europe was divided into a multitude of large and small States. The large feudatories were complete masters of their own possessions. They issued laws, saw to their. execution, held courts of justice, inflicted penalties, maintained their own forces, raided their neighbours and did not always refrain from highway robbery. Many of them independently minted coinage. The smaller feudal lords also had exceedingly wide rights in respect of the people under their power; they tried to vie with the great lords.
In the course of time feudal relations created an exceedingly confused tangle of rights and obligations. Endless disputes and quarrels arose between the feudal lords. They were usually decided by force of arms in internecine wars.
Development of the Productive Forces of Feudal Society
In the feudal period a higher level of productive forces was achieved compared with the period of slavery.
In the sphere of agriculture the technique of production was improved; the iron plough and other iron implements of labour were used more extensively.
New branches of cultivation arose; vine-growing, wine-making and market gardening developed considerably. Livestock husbandry grew and particularly horse-breeding, which was linked with the feudal lords’ military service; butter- making developed. Sheep-breeding became widespread in a number of regions. Meadows and pastures were extended and improved.
Gradually, the implements of labour of the craftsmen and methods of processing raw material were improved. Former crafts began to become specialised. Thus, for example, the blacksmith had formerly produced all metal articles. In the course of time the crafts of the armourer, nail-maker, cutler and locksmith separated from the trade of blacksmith, and the craft of the shoemaker and the saddlemaker were separated from the craft of the leather worker. In the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries in Europe the spinning wheel became wide-spread. In 1600 the ribbon loom was invented.
The improvement of the smelting and working of iron was of decisive significance in perfecting the implements of labour. At first iron was produced by an exceedingly primitive method. In the fourteenth century the water-wheel was first used to work bellows for the blast, and heavy hammers to crush the ore. With the increased draught in the furnaces, instead of a malleable mass, a molten mass, cast iron, was obtained. With the application of gunpowder in warfare and the appearance of firearms (in the fourteenth century) much metal was required for cannon balls; from the beginning of the fifteenth century they began to be cast from pig-iron. More and more metal was needed for the production of agricultural and other implements. In the first half of the fifteenth century the first blast furnaces appeared. The invention of the compass helped the further development of navigation and seafaring. The invention and spread of printing was of great significance.
China had achieved a considerable development of its productive forces and culture by the sixth to eleventh centuries, in many respects surpassing the Europe of that time. The Chinese were the first to invent the compass, gunpowder, writing-paper and a very simple form of printing.
The development of the productive forces of feudal society more and more clashed with the narrow framework of feudal production relations. The peasantry, under the yoke of feudal exploitation, were in no condition to increase further the output of agricultural produce. The productivity of unfree peasant labour was exceedingly low. In the town the growth of the craftsman’s productivity of labour came up against the obstacles created by guild statutes and rules. The feudal system was characterised by the slow rate of development of production, by routine and by the authority of tradition.
The productive forces which had grown up in the framework of feudal society demanded new relations of production.
The Birth of Capitalist Production in the Womb of the Feudal System.
The Role of Merchant Capital In the feudal period commodity production gradually developed, town handicrafts expanded and peasant economy was more and more drawn into exchange.
Production by small craftsmen and peasants, based on private property and personal labour creating products for exchange, is called simple commodity production.
As has already been said a product made for exchange is a commodity.
Different commodity producers expend on the production of the same commodities an unequal quantity of labour. This depends on the different conditions in which they have to work: commodity producers possessing improved implements expend on the production of one and the same commodity less labour in comparison with other commodity producers. In addition to differences in the implements of labour, differences in strength, dexterity, the skill of the worker and so on have their effect. The market, however, is not concerned in what conditions and with what implements one commodity or another is produced. For identical commodities on the market one and the same amount of money is paid independent of those individual conditions of labour in which they were produced.
Therefore, commodity producers whose individual labour expenditure, because of worse conditions of production, are higher than average cover only part of these costs when selling their commodities and ultimately are ruined.
On the other hand, commodity producers whose individual labour expenditure thanks to better conditions of production are lower than average, are in an advantageous position when selling their commodities, and grow rich. This strengthens competition. A differentiation takes place among small commodity producers. The majority of them become more and more impoverished, an insignificant section grow rich.
The divided condition of the country under feudalism was a great hindrance in the way of the development of commodity production. The feudal lords established at will dues on imported goods, exacted tribute for passage through their possessions, and thus created serious obstacles to the development of trade. The requirements of trade and the economic development of society in general evoked the necessity of abolishing feudal separatism. The growth of handicraft and agricultural production, the development of the social division of labour between town and country, led to the intensification of economic links between different districts within the country and to the formation of a national market. The formation of a national market created the economic preconditions for the centralisation of State power. The nascent town bourgeoisie was concerned to remove feudal obstacles and supported the creation of a centralised State.
The kings, relying on the broader stratum of non-noble landowners (gentry), on the “vassals of their vassals" and also on the rising towns, dealt the feudal nobility decisive blows and strengthened their own dominance. They became not only nominal, but also effective sovereigns in the State. Large national States emerged in the form of absolute monarchies. The overcoming of feudal separatism and the creation of centralised State power facilitated the appearance and development of capitalist relations.
The formation of a world market was also of great significance for the rise of the capitalist order.
In the second half of the fifteenth century the Turks seized Constantinople and the whole of the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea. The most important artery along which passed the trade routes between Western Europe and the East was cut. In the search for the sea route to India, Columbus discovered America in 1492; while in 1498 Vasco da Gama, having sailed round Africa, discovered the sea route to India.
As a result of these discoveries the focal point of European trade moved from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, the bulk of trade, passed to the Netherlands, England and France. Russia played a noticeable role in European trade.
With the rise of world trade and a world market handicrafts were no longer in a position to satisfy the growing demand for goods. This hastened the transition from small-scale artisan production to large-scale capitalist production, based on the exploitation of wage-workers.
The advance from the feudal mode of production to the capitalist was made in two ways: on the one hand; the differentiation among the small commodity producers gave birth to capitalist entrepreneurs; on the other hand, merchant capital, through the merchants, directly subordinated production to itself.
The guilds were able to limit competition and differentiation among the craftsmen so long as commodity production was little developed. With the development of exchange, competition became stronger and stronger. The masters working for a wider market in part obtained the alteration of guild restrictions, and in part simply evaded them. They lengthened the working day of the journeymen and apprentices, increased their number and applied more productive methods of labour. The richest master craftsmen gradually became capitalists, while the poorer masters, apprentices and journeymen became wage-workers.
Merchant capital assisted the rise of capitalist production by breaking down the natural economy. Merchant capital first appeared as an intermediary in the exchange of the commodities of the small producers-the craftsmen and the peasants-and in the realisation by the feudal lords of part of the surplus product which they appropriated. Later, the merchant began to buy up regularly from the small producers the commodities they had made and then to resell them on a wider market. The merchant became an engrosser. With the growth of competition and the appearance of the engrosser the position of the mass of the craftsmen radically changed. The impoverished masters were compelled to turn for help to the trader or engrosser, who loaned them money and raw materials on condition that they should sell him the finished articles at a pre-arranged low price. Thus, the small producers fell into economic dependence on merchant capital.
Gradually many impoverished masters found themselves dependent in this way on the rich engrosser. He distributed raw material to them-for example, thread to be worked up into cloth for a definite payment-and thus became a putter-out.
The impoverishment of the craftsman resulted in the engrosser now supplying him not only with raw materials, but also with implements of labour.
Thus the craftsman was deprived of the last semblance of independent existence, and was finally converted into a wage-worker, while the engrosser was becoming an industrial capitalist.
The craftsmen of yesterday, gathered in the capitalist’s workshop, carried out uniform work. Soon, however, it was discovered that certain of them were more successful with one operation, others with another. Therefore it was more advantageous to entrust to each one just that part of the work at which he was most skilful. Thus, in the workshops with a fairly considerable number of workers division of labour was gradually introduced.
Capitalist enterprises using wage-workers who worked by hand on the basis of division of labour were called manufactories. [2]
The first manufactories already appeared in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Florence and some medieval city republics of Italy. Then, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, manufactories in various branches of production-cloth, linen, silk, watchmaking, arms and glass-spread in all European countries.
In Russia manufactories began to arise in the seventeenth century. At the beginning of the eighteenth century under Peter I they began to develop at faster rates. Among them were arms, cloth, silk and other manufactories. Iron foundries, mines and salt works were created in the Urals.
As distinct from the West European factories, which were based on wage labour, Russian enterprises in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, while employing some free wage labour, in the main employed the labour of peasant serfs and bound workers. Manufactories based on free wage labour began to become widespread from the end of the eighteenth century. This process was particularly intensified in the last decades before the abolition of serfdom.
The process of the breakdown of feudal relations was also taking place in the countryside. With the development of commodity production the power of money grew. The feudal serf-owners. substituted money payments for the peasants’ payments in kind. The peasants had to sell the products of their labour and pay the feudal lords the money they had obtained. Chronic need of money appeared among the peasants. Engrossers and usurers made use of this to make the peasants their bondmen. Feudal oppression intensified and the position of the serfs deteriorated.
The development of money relations gave a great impetus to the differentiation of the peasantry, i.e., its stratification into different social groups. The overwhelming majority of the peasantry became impoverished, stifled from overwork and were ruined. Side by side with this kulak land-grabbers began to appear m the countryside, exploiting their fellow-villagers by means of loans at extortionate rates and buying up from them agricultural produce, cattle and farm equipment at ruinous prices.
Thus, capitalist production came into existence in the womb of the feudal system.
Primitive Capital Accumulation.
Forcible Seizure of Peasant Lands
Capitalist production presupposes two basic conditions: one, the presence of numbers of propertyless people, personally free and at the same time deprived of the means of production and livelihood and, therefore, compelled to hire themselves out for work to the capitalists; and two, the accumulation of the wealth in money necessary to create large capitalist enterprises.
We have seen that capitalism drew its sustenance from small commodity production based on private property, with its competition bringing enrichment to the few and ruin to the majority of small producers. The slowness of this process, however, did not correspond to the requirement of the new world market created by the great discoveries of the end of the fifteenth century. The rise of the capitalist mode of production was hastened by the application of the crudest methods of violence by the large landowners, bourgeoisie and the State power which was in the hands of the exploiting classes. Force, in Marx’s expression, played the part of the midwife, hastening the birth of the new capitalist mode of production.
Some bourgeois historians idyllically depict the history of the rise of the capitalist and working classes. In immemorial times, they assert, there existed a group of assiduous and careful men who accumulated wealth by their labour.
On the other hand, there existed a number of lazy-bones and idlers who squandered all their substance and were converted into propertyless proletarians.
These fables of the defenders of capitalism have no connection with reality.
In fact, the formation of the mass of propertyless people, the proletariat, and the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few took place by means of the forcible deprivation of the small producers of their means of production. The process of the separation of the producers from the means of production (the land, implements of production, and so on) was accompanied by an endless succession of acts of plunder and cruelty. This process is called primitive capital accumulation since it preceded the creation of large-scale capitalist production.
Capitalist production achieved considerable development first of all in England. From the end of the fifteenth century there took place in that country an agonising process of the forcible expulsion of the peasants from the land.
The increased demand for wool from the large cloth manufactories, which arose first in Flanders and then in England itself, gave the direct impetus to this. The landlords began to raise large flocks of sheep. Pastures were needed for sheep-raising. The feudal lords drove off the peasants in masses from the places they occupied, seized the lands which had been in their permanent possession, and converted the arable into pastures.
The expulsion of the peasants from the land was carried out by various means, and primarily by means of the open seizure of common lands. The landlords enclosed these lands, destroyed the peasant homes and forcibly expelled the peasants. If the peasants attempted to get back the land illegally seized from them, the armed force of the State came to the help of the landlord. The State power began to issue laws in the eighteenth century on “enclosure", justifying the plundering of the peasants.
The ruined and plundered peasants formed innumerable crowds of indigent beggars who filled the towns, villages and roads of England. Having no means of existence they became beggars. The State authority issued bloody laws against those who had been expropriated. These laws were distinguished by their exceptional ferocity. Thus, in the reign of the English king Henry VIII (sixteenth century), 72,000 people were executed for “vagabondage".
In Tsarist Russia, which entered the road of capitalist development later than other European countries, the separation of the producer from the means of production was effected in the same ways as in other countries. In 1861 the Tsarist government, under the influence of peasant risings was compelled to abolish serfdom.
This reform was a gigantic plundering of the peasants. The landlords seized two-thirds of the land, leaving only one-third for the use of the peasants. The most convenient lands, and also in a number of cases the pastures, ponds, roads to the fields and so on which were used by the peasant, were cut off by the landlords. In the hands of the landlords the lands “cut off" by the landlords became a means of imposing a new bondage on the peasants, compelled to rent these lands from the landlords on the most burdensome conditions. The law while announcing the personal freedom of the peasants, temporarily preserved week-work and quitrent. For the reduced plot of land which he received, the peasant was obliged to carry out these duties for the landlord until the land had been paid for. The scale of purchase payments was reckoned at inflated prices for land and amounted to about two milliard roubles.
Characterising the features of the peasant reform of 1861 Lenin wrote:
“They all represent the first acts of mass violence against the peasantry in the interests of nascent capitalism in agriculture. It is the ‘clearing of estates’ for capitalism by the landlords." (Lenin, “The Agrarian Programme of Social Democracy in the First Russian Revolution", Selected Works, English edition, vol. III, p. 182.),,
A double result was achieved by the eviction of the peasants from the land. On the one hand, the land became the private property of a comparatively small group of landowners.
Feudal estate property in land was converted into bourgeois property. On the other hand, an abundant influx into industry of free workers ready to hire themselves to the capitalists, was assured.
Apart from the presence of a cheap labour force, the accumulation in a few hands of great wealth, in the form of sums of money which could be converted into any means of production and used to hire workers, was essential for the appearance of capitalist production.
In the Middle Ages large amounts of money were accumulated by traders and usurers. This wealth was later used as the basis for organising many capitalist enterprises.
The conquest of America, which was accompanied by the mass plundering and extermination of the native population, brought the conquerors incalculable riches which began to grow still faster as a result of the exploitation of very rich mines of gold and silver. Hands were needed for the mines. The native population, the Indians, perished in masses, not surviving the harsh labour conditions. European merchants in Africa organised the hunting of negroes which was carried out entirely as though it was wild animals they hunted. The trade in negroes exported from Africa and converted into slaves was exceptionally profitable. The slave traders’ profits achieved fabulous heights. Negro slave labour began to be widely applied in the cotton plantations of America.
Colonial trade was also one of the most important sources for the creation of large fortunes. Dutch, English and French merchants organised East India companies for trade with India. These companies were supported by their governments. They were granted the monopoly of trade in colonial commodities and the right of unlimited exploitation of the colonies with the use of any forcible measures they pleased. The profits of the East India companies were reckoned in hundreds per cent per year. In Russia rapacious trading with the population of Siberia gave the merchants huge profits, as did the plunderous system of liquor monopolies, which consisted in the State’s granting to private entrepreneurs the right to produce and sell alcoholic liquors for a definite payment.
Huge wealth in money was concentrated in the hands of commercial and usurers’ capital as a result.
Thus, at the price of the plundering and ruin of the mass of small producers, the wealth essential for the creation of large capitalist enterprises ‘was accumulated. Describing this process, Marx wrote: “... capital comes [into the world] dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." (Marx, Capital, Kerr edition, vol. I, p. 834.)
The Birth of Capitalist Production in the Womb of the Feudal System.
The Role of Merchant Capital In the feudal period commodity production gradually developed, town handicrafts expanded and peasant economy was more and more drawn into exchange.
Production by small craftsmen and peasants, based on private property and personal labour creating products for exchange, is called simple commodity production.
As has already been said a product made for exchange is a commodity.
Different commodity producers expend on the production of the same commodities an unequal quantity of labour. This depends on the different conditions in which they have to work: commodity producers possessing improved implements expend on the production of one and the same commodity less labour in comparison with other commodity producers. In addition to differences in the implements of labour, differences in strength, dexterity, the skill of the worker and so on have their effect. The market, however, is not concerned in what conditions and with what implements one commodity or another is produced. For identical commodities on the market one and the same amount of money is paid independent of those individual conditions of labour in which they were produced.
Therefore, commodity producers whose individual labour expenditure, because of worse conditions of production, are higher than average cover only part of these costs when selling their commodities and ultimately are ruined.
On the other hand, commodity producers whose individual labour expenditure thanks to better conditions of production are lower than average, are in an advantageous position when selling their commodities, and grow rich. This strengthens competition. A differentiation takes place among small commodity producers. The majority of them become more and more impoverished, an insignificant section grow rich.
The divided condition of the country under feudalism was a great hindrance in the way of the development of commodity production. The feudal lords established at will dues on imported goods, exacted tribute for passage through their possessions, and thus created serious obstacles to the development of trade. The requirements of trade and the economic development of society in general evoked the necessity of abolishing feudal separatism. The growth of handicraft and agricultural production, the development of the social division of labour between town and country, led to the intensification of economic links between different districts within the country and to the formation of a national market. The formation of a national market created the economic preconditions for the centralisation of State power. The nascent town bourgeoisie was concerned to remove feudal obstacles and supported the creation of a centralised State.
The kings, relying on the broader stratum of non-noble landowners (gentry), on the “vassals of their vassals" and also on the rising towns, dealt the feudal nobility decisive blows and strengthened their own dominance. They became not only nominal, but also effective sovereigns in the State. Large national States emerged in the form of absolute monarchies. The overcoming of feudal separatism and the creation of centralised State power facilitated the appearance and development of capitalist relations.
The formation of a world market was also of great significance for the rise of the capitalist order.
In the second half of the fifteenth century the Turks seized Constantinople and the whole of the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea. The most important artery along which passed the trade routes between Western Europe and the East was cut. In the search for the sea route to India, Columbus discovered America in 1492; while in 1498 Vasco da Gama, having sailed round Africa, discovered the sea route to India.
As a result of these discoveries the focal point of European trade moved from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, the bulk of trade, passed to the Netherlands, England and France. Russia played a noticeable role in European trade.
With the rise of world trade and a world market handicrafts were no longer in a position to satisfy the growing demand for goods. This hastened the transition from small-scale artisan production to large-scale capitalist production, based on the exploitation of wage-workers.
The advance from the feudal mode of production to the capitalist was made in two ways: on the one hand; the differentiation among the small commodity producers gave birth to capitalist entrepreneurs; on the other hand, merchant capital, through the merchants, directly subordinated production to itself.
The guilds were able to limit competition and differentiation among the craftsmen so long as commodity production was little developed. With the development of exchange, competition became stronger and stronger. The masters working for a wider market in part obtained the alteration of guild restrictions, and in part simply evaded them. They lengthened the working day of the journeymen and apprentices, increased their number and applied more productive methods of labour. The richest master craftsmen gradually became capitalists, while the poorer masters, apprentices and journeymen became wage-workers.
Merchant capital assisted the rise of capitalist production by breaking down the natural economy. Merchant capital first appeared as an intermediary in the exchange of the commodities of the small producers-the craftsmen and the peasants-and in the realisation by the feudal lords of part of the surplus product which they appropriated. Later, the merchant began to buy up regularly from the small producers the commodities they had made and then to resell them on a wider market. The merchant became an engrosser. With the growth of competition and the appearance of the engrosser the position of the mass of the craftsmen radically changed. The impoverished masters were compelled to turn for help to the trader or engrosser, who loaned them money and raw materials on condition that they should sell him the finished articles at a pre-arranged low price. Thus, the small producers fell into economic dependence on merchant capital.
Gradually many impoverished masters found themselves dependent in this way on the rich engrosser. He distributed raw material to them-for example, thread to be worked up into cloth for a definite payment-and thus became a putter-out.
The impoverishment of the craftsman resulted in the engrosser now supplying him not only with raw materials, but also with implements of labour.
Thus the craftsman was deprived of the last semblance of independent existence, and was finally converted into a wage-worker, while the engrosser was becoming an industrial capitalist.
The craftsmen of yesterday, gathered in the capitalist’s workshop, carried out uniform work. Soon, however, it was discovered that certain of them were more successful with one operation, others with another. Therefore it was more advantageous to entrust to each one just that part of the work at which he was most skilful. Thus, in the workshops with a fairly considerable number of workers division of labour was gradually introduced.
Capitalist enterprises using wage-workers who worked by hand on the basis of division of labour were called manufactories. [3] The first manufactories already appeared in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Florence and some medieval city republics of Italy. Then, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, manufactories in various branches of production-cloth, linen, silk, watchmaking, arms and glass-spread in all European countries.
In Russia manufactories began to arise in the seventeenth century. At the beginning of the eighteenth century under Peter I they began to develop at faster rates. Among them were arms, cloth, silk and other manufactories. Iron foundries, mines and salt works were created in the Urals.
As distinct from the West European factories, which were based on wage labour, Russian enterprises in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, while employing some free wage labour, in the main employed the labour of peasant serfs and bound workers. Manufactories based on free wage labour began to become widespread from the end of the eighteenth century. This process was particularly intensified in the last decades before the abolition of serfdom.
The process of the breakdown of feudal relations was also taking place in the countryside. With the development of commodity production the power of money grew. The feudal serf-owners. substituted money payments for the peasants’ payments in kind. The peasants had to sell the products of their labour and pay the feudal lords the money they had obtained. Chronic need of money appeared among the peasants. Engrossers and usurers made use of this to make the peasants their bondmen. Feudal oppression intensified and the position of the serfs deteriorated.
The development of money relations gave a great impetus to the differentiation of the peasantry, i.e., its stratification into different social groups. The overwhelming majority of the peasantry became impoverished, stifled from overwork and were ruined. Side by side with this kulak land-grabbers began to appear m the countryside, exploiting their fellow-villagers by means of loans at extortionate rates and buying up from them agricultural produce, cattle and farm equipment at ruinous prices.
Thus, capitalist production came into existence in the womb of the feudal system.
Primitive Capital Accumulation. Forcible Seizure of Peasant Lands
Capitalist production presupposes two basic conditions: one, the presence of numbers of propertyless people, personally free and at the same time deprived of the means of production and livelihood and, therefore, compelled to hire themselves out for work to the capitalists; and two, the accumulation of the wealth in money necessary to create large capitalist enterprises.
We have seen that capitalism drew its sustenance from small commodity production based on private property, with its competition bringing enrichment to the few and ruin to the majority of small producers. The slowness of this process, however, did not correspond to the requirement of the new world market created by the great discoveries of the end of the fifteenth century. The rise of the capitalist mode of production was hastened by the application of the crudest methods of violence by the large landowners, bourgeoisie and the State power which was in the hands of the exploiting classes. Force, in Marx’s expression, played the part of the midwife, hastening the birth of the new capitalist mode of production.
Some bourgeois historians idyllically depict the history of the rise of the capitalist and working classes. In immemorial times, they assert, there existed a group of assiduous and careful men who accumulated wealth by their labour.
On the other hand, there existed a number of lazy-bones and idlers who squandered all their substance and were converted into propertyless proletarians.
These fables of the defenders of capitalism have no connection with reality.
In fact, the formation of the mass of propertyless people, the proletariat, and the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few took place by means of the forcible deprivation of the small producers of their means of production. The process of the separation of the producers from the means of production (the land, implements of production, and so on) was accompanied by an endless succession of acts of plunder and cruelty. This process is called primitive capital accumulation since it preceded the creation of large-scale capitalist production.
Capitalist production achieved considerable development first of all in England. From the end of the fifteenth century there took place in that country an agonising process of the forcible expulsion of the peasants from the land.
The increased demand for wool from the large cloth manufactories, which arose first in Flanders and then in England itself, gave the direct impetus to this. The landlords began to raise large flocks of sheep. Pastures were needed for sheep-raising. The feudal lords drove off the peasants in masses from the places they occupied, seized the lands which had been in their permanent possession, and converted the arable into pastures.
The expulsion of the peasants from the land was carried out by various means, and primarily by means of the open seizure of common lands. The landlords enclosed these lands, destroyed the peasant homes and forcibly expelled the peasants. If the peasants attempted to get back the land illegally seized from them, the armed force of the State came to the help of the landlord. The State power began to issue laws in the eighteenth century on “enclosure", justifying the plundering of the peasants.
The ruined and plundered peasants formed innumerable crowds of indigent beggars who filled the towns, villages and roads of England. Having no means of existence they became beggars. The State authority issued bloody laws against those who had been expropriated. These laws were distinguished by their exceptional ferocity. Thus, in the reign of the English king Henry VIII (sixteenth century), 72,000 people were executed for “vagabondage".
In Tsarist Russia, which entered the road of capitalist development later than other European countries, the separation of the producer from the means of production was effected in the same ways as in other countries. In 1861 the Tsarist government, under the influence of peasant risings was compelled to abolish serfdom.
This reform was a gigantic plundering of the peasants. The landlords seized two-thirds of the land, leaving only one-third for the use of the peasants. The most convenient lands, and also in a number of cases the pastures, ponds, roads to the fields and so on which were used by the peasant, were cut off by the landlords. In the hands of the landlords the lands “cut off" by the landlords became a means of imposing a new bondage on the peasants, compelled to rent these lands from the landlords on the most burdensome conditions. The law while announcing the personal freedom of the peasants, temporarily preserved week-work and quitrent. For the reduced plot of land which he received, the peasant was obliged to carry out these duties for the landlord until the land had been paid for. The scale of purchase payments was reckoned at inflated prices for land and amounted to about two milliard roubles.
Characterising the features of the peasant reform of 1861 Lenin wrote:
“They all represent the first acts of mass violence against the peasantry in the interests of nascent capitalism in agriculture. It is the ‘clearing of estates’ for capitalism by the landlords." (Lenin, “The Agrarian Programme of Social Democracy in the First Russian Revolution", Selected Works, English edition, vol. III, p. 182.),, A double result was achieved by the eviction of the peasants from the land.
On the one hand, the land became the private property of a comparatively small group of landowners.
Feudal estate property in land was converted into bourgeois property. On the other hand, an abundant influx into industry of free workers ready to hire themselves to the capitalists, was assured.
Apart from the presence of a cheap labour force, the accumulation in a few hands of great wealth, in the form of sums of money which could be converted into any means of production and used to hire workers, was essential for the appearance of capitalist production.
In the Middle Ages large amounts of money were accumulated by traders and usurers. This wealth was later used as the basis for organising many capitalist enterprises.
The conquest of America, which was accompanied by the mass plundering and extermination of the native population, brought the conquerors incalculable riches which began to grow still faster as a result of the exploitation of very rich mines of gold and silver. Hands were needed for the mines. The native population, the Indians, perished in masses, not surviving the harsh labour conditions. European merchants in Africa organised the hunting of negroes which was carried out entirely as though it was wild animals they hunted. The trade in negroes exported from Africa and converted into slaves was exceptionally profitable. The slave traders’ profits achieved fabulous heights. Negro slave labour began to be widely applied in the cotton plantations of America.
Colonial trade was also one of the most important sources for the creation of large fortunes. Dutch, English and French merchants organised East India companies for trade with India. These companies were supported by their governments. They were granted the monopoly of trade in colonial commodities and the right of unlimited exploitation of the colonies with the use of any forcible measures they pleased. The profits of the East India companies were reckoned in hundreds per cent per year. In Russia rapacious trading with the population of Siberia gave the merchants huge profits, as did the plunderous system of liquor monopolies, which consisted in the State’s granting to private entrepreneurs the right to produce and sell alcoholic liquors for a definite payment.
Huge wealth in money was concentrated in the hands of commercial and usurers’ capital as a result.
Thus, at the price of the plundering and ruin of the mass of small producers, the wealth essential for the creation of large capitalist enterprises ‘was accumulated. Describing this process, Marx wrote: “... capital comes [into the world] dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." (Marx, Capital, Kerr edition, vol. I, p. 834.)
Peasant Serf Risings. Bourgeois Revolutions.
Fall of the Feudal System
The struggle of the peasantry against the feudal landowners took place throughout the whole feudal epoch, but it became particularly sharp towards the end of this epoch. In the fourteenth century France was in the grip of a peasant war which has gone down to history as the “Jacquerie". The rising bourgeoisie of the towns at first supported this movement, but left it at the decisive moment.
At the end of the fourteenth century in England a peasant revolt flared up which covered the greater part of the country. Armed peasants headed by Wat Tyler went through the country, sacking landlords’ estates and the monasteries, and entered London. The feudal lords turned to violence and deceit in order to suppress the rising. Tyler was treacherously killed. Believing the promises of the king and the feudal lords the rebels dispersed to their homes. After this, punitive expeditions went about the countryside dealing out savage punishment to the peasants.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century Germany was convulsed by a peasant war supported by the town poor. Thomas Münzer was the leader of the rebels. The peasants demanded the abolition of the licence and violence of the gentry.
In Russia the peasant wars headed by Stepan Razin in the seventeenth century and Emelyan Pugachov in the eighteenth century were on a particularly large scale. The rebellious peasants sought the abolition of serfdom, the transfer to themselves of the landowners’ and government lands and the ending of landlord rule. The intensification of the crisis of the feudal serf-owning system of economy in the 1850’s was expressed in a broad wave of peasant risings on the eve of the 1861 reform.
In China peasant wars and risings on a huge scale took place throughout the centuries. The rising of the T’ai P’ing in the period of the Tsing dynasty (middle of the nineteenth century) embraced the millions of the peasantry. The rebels occupied the ancient capital of China, Nanking. The T’ai P’ing agrarian law proclaimed equality in the use of land and other property. In State organisation the T’ai P’ing linked monarchy and peasant democracy in their own way, which is also characteristic of peasant movements in other countries.
The revolutionary significance of peasant risings was that they shook the foundations of feudalism and in the end led to the abolition of serfdom.
The transition from feudalism to capitalism in the countries of Western Europe took place through bourgeois revolutions. The struggle of the peasants against the landowners was used by the rising bourgeoisie in order to hasten the downfall of the feudal system, to replace serf exploitation by capitalist exploitation and take power into their own hands. The peasants formed the basic mass of those fighting against feudalism in the bourgeois revolutions. So it was in the first bourgeois revolution in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century. So it was in the English revolution of the seventeenth century. So it was in the bourgeois revolution in France at the end of the eighteenth century.
The bourgeoisie used the fruits of the revolutionary struggle of the peasantry, climbing to power on its shoulders. The peasants were strong in their hatred of the oppressors. The peasant risings, however, bore a spontaneous character. The peasantry, as a class of small private owners, was split up and could not create a clear programme or a strong and well-knit organisation for the struggle. Peasant risings can lead to success only if they unite with the workers’ movement and if the workers lead the peasant risings.
At the period of the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, the working class was still weak, few in numbers and unorganised.
In the womb of feudal society more or less complete forms of the capitalist order ripened. The new exploiting class, the capitalist class, grew up and there appeared at the same time masses of people deprived of the means of production, the proletarians.
In the period of bourgeois revolutions the bourgeoisie used against feudalism the economic law of the obligatory correspondence between relations of production and the character of the forces of production; they overthrew feudal production relations, created new, bourgeois production relations and brought production relations into keeping with the character of the forces of production which had ripened in the womb of feudalism.
The bourgeois revolutions put an end to the feudal system and established the dominance of capitalism.
Economic Views of the Feudal Period
The social system dominant at that time was reflected in the economic views of the feudal period. Mental life in feudal society was under the control of the clergy and therefore found expression predominantly in a religious and scholastic form. Considerations on the economic life of that time formed special sections in theological tracts.
Economic opinions in China were for many centuries under the influence of the teaching of Confucius. Confucianism as a religious ideology had arisen already in the fifth century B.C. The social and economic views of Confucianism require strict maintenance of the hierarchy of feudal estates, both in State structure and in family life. In Confucius’s words, “the unenlightened people should obey the aristocrats and wise men. Disobedience by ordinary people to their superiors is the beginning of disorder". At the same time, Confucius called upon the “nobles" to be “humane" and not to treat the poor too harshly. Confucius advocated the necessity of uniting China, which was then divided, under the rule of a monarch. Confucius and his followers idealised backward forms of economy and extolled the “golden age" of the patriarchal past. The peasantry, crushed by the feudal aristocracy and the merchants, put into the Confucian preachings their own aspirations and hopes for betterment of their lot, though Confucianism did not express the class interests of the peasantry. As it developed, Confucianism became transformed into the official ideology of the feudal nobility. It was used by the ruling classes for the purpose of training the people in a spirit of slavish submission to the feudalists and of perpetuating the feudal system.
One of the ideologists of feudalism in medieval Europe, Thomas Aquinas (thirteenth century), attempted to justify the need for feudal society by divine law. Proclaiming feudal property as necessary and reasonable, and declaring the peasant serfs to be slaves, Thomas Aquinas, in opposition to the ancient slave-owners, asserted that “in his soul the slave is free" and therefore a master has no right to kill a slave. Labour was no longer considered unworthy of a free man. Thomas Aquinas regarded physical labour as base, and mental labour as noble.
In this division he saw the justification for society’s division into estates. The same approach from the point of view of the feudal estates appeared in his views on wealth. Each person should own wealth in keeping with the position which he occupied on the hierarchical feudal ladder. From this point of view the teaching of the medieval theologians on .the so-called ‘‘just’’ price is characteristic. The “just" price should reflect the quantity of labour expended in producing a commodity, and the estate of the producer.
Medieval defenders of the ‘‘just’’ price did not protest at all against merchant profits. They only strove to confine profits within bounds so that they would not threaten the economic existence of the other estates. They condemned usury as a low and immoral occupation. With the development of commodity production and exchange, however, the clergy themselves began to take part in money-lending; along with this, the attitude of the Church to usury became more and more tolerant.
The class struggle of the oppressed and exploited masses against the ruling classes of feudal society developed in a religious form for several centuries. The demands of exploited peasants and journeymen were frequently based on quotations from the Bible. All sorts of sects were very widespread. The Catholic church, fiercely persecuting “heretics" through the Inquisition, burned them at the stake.
With the development of the class struggle, the religious form of the movement of the oppressed masses retreated into the background, and the revolutionary character of this movement stood out ever more clearly. The peasants demanded the suppression of serf slavery, the abolition of feudal privileges, the establishment of equal rights, the abolition of estates, and so on.
In the course of the peasant wars in England, Bohemia and Germany the slogans of the rebels became more and more radical. The longing of the exploited masses of town and country for equality expressed itself in the demand for community of property. This was a yearning for equality in the sphere of consumption. Although the demand for community of property was unrealisable, it was of revolutionary significance at that time since it rallied the masses in struggle against feudal oppression.
Towards the end of the feudal period two outstanding early Utopian Socialists appeared-the Englishman Thomas More, who wrote Utopia (sixteenth century) and the Italian Tomaso Campanella whose book is called City of the Sun (seventeenth century). Seeing the growing inequality and contradictions of contemporary society, these thinkers expounded their views on the causes of social evils in an original form; they described what were, in their opinion, ideal social systems, from which these evils would be excluded.
In the books of these Utopians a social system is described which is free from private property and all its accompanying faults. Every one in this society is engaged in both handicraft and agricultural labour. All inhabitants work six, or even four, hours a day, and the fruits of their labour are entirely sufficient to satisfy all their needs. Products are distributed according to need. The education of children is a concern of society.
The works of More and Campanella played a progressive part in the process of the development of social thought. They contained ideas considerably in advance of the development of society of that time. More and Campanella, however, did not know the laws of social development, and their ideas were unrealisable, “Utopian". It was impossible at that time to destroy social inequality; the level of productive forces demanded the advance from feudal to capitalist exploitation.
The rise of capitalism belongs to the sixteenth century. To the same century belong the first attempts to comprehend and explain a number of the phenomena of capitalism. Thus in the.sixteenth to eighteenth centuries there arose and developed the trend of economic thought and policy known as mercantilism.
Mercantilism arose in England, and afterwards it appeared in France, Italy and other countries. The mercantilists discussed the question of the country’s wealth, the forms of wealth and the ways of its growth.
This was a time when capital-in the form. of merchant and usurers’ capital-was predominant in the sphere of trade and credit. In the sphere of production, however, it had made only the first steps by founding manufactories. After the discovery and conquest of America a flood of gold and silver poured into Europe. Gold and silver were then ceaselessly re-distributed among the individual European States, both by means of wars and through foreign trade.
In their understanding of the nature of wealth the mercantilists started from the superficial phenomena of circulation. They concentrated attention not on production, but on trade and money circulation, particularly the movement of gold and silver.
In the view of the mercantilists, not social production and its products, but money, gold and silver, was the sole real wealth. The mercantilists demanded active intervention in economic life by the State, so that as much money as possible should flow into the country and as little as possible pass beyond its limits. The early mercantilists sought to achieve this by purely administrative measures, forbidding the export of money from the country. Later mercantilists considered it essential to expand foreign trade for these ends. Thus an English partisan of mercantilism, Thomas Mun (1571-1641), a great merchant and director of the East India Company wrote: “The ordinary means therefore to increase our wealth and treasure is by Foreign Trade, wherein we must ever observe this rule; to sell more to strangers yearly than we consume of theirs in value." The mercantilists reflected the interests of the bourgeoisie which was growing up in the womb of feudalism and striving to accumulate wealth in gold and silver by developing foreign trade, colonial plunder and trade wars and the enslavement of backward peoples. In connection with the development of capitalism, they began to demand that the State authorities should protect the development of industrial enterprises, the manufactories. Export bounties, which were paid to merchants selling commodities on the foreign market, were established. Import duties soon became still more significant. With the development of the manufactories and later of factories, the imposition of duties on imported commodities became the most widespread defence measure of home industry against foreign competition.
Such a defensive policy is called protectionism. In many countries it remained for a long time after the conceptions of mercantilism had been overcome.
In England protective duties were of great significance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when competition from the more developed manufactories of the Netherlands threatened her. From the eighteenth century England was steadily gaining industrial leadership.
Other less developed countries could not compete with her. Consequently, ideas of free trade began to gain ground in England.
A different situation was created in countries which entered on the capitalist road later than England. Thus, in France in the seventeenth century Colbert, the minister of Louis XIV, who in’ fact ruled the country, created a widely ramified system of State patronage of manufactories.
His system included high import duties, the prohibition of exports of raw materials, the introduction of a number of new branches of industry, the setting up of companies for foreign trade, and so on.
Mercantilism played a progressive part for its time. The protectionist policy inspired by the ideas of mercantilism greatly helped the spread of manufactories. The lack of development of capitalist production at that time, however, was reflected in the mercantilists’ views of wealth. The further development of capitalism made the unsoundness of the conceptions of the mercantile system more and more evident.
In Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the feudal serf-owning system of economy was dominant. The economy was basically a natural one. At the same time, trade and handicraft developed considerably, a national market was formed and manufactories began to arise. These economic changes in the country helped to strengthen absolutism in Russia.
The representatives of Russian economic thought, reflecting the historical and economic peculiarities of the country, developed certain mercantilist ideas. However, as distinct from many West European mercantilists, they ascribed great significance not only to trade, but also to the development of industry and agriculture.
The economic views of that time were reflected in the works and measures of the seventeenth century Russian statesman A.L. Ordyn-Nashchokin, in the economic policy of Peter I and in the works of the most important Russian economist of the beginning of the eighteenth century, 1.T. Pososhkov.
In his Book on Poverty and Wealth (1724) I.T. Pososhkov expounded a broad programme of Russian economic development and offered a developed justification for this programme. Pososhkov demonstrated the necessity of adopting a number of economic measures in Russia with the aim of protecting the development of home industry trade and agriculture and improving the country’s financial system.
In the last third of the eighteenth century a tendency to the breakdown of feudal serf-owning relations was noticeable in Russia; this became much more acute in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and later grew into a direct crisis of serfdom.
The initiator of the revolutionary-democratic trend in Russian social thought, A.N. Radishchev (1749-1802), was an outstanding economist of his time. Radishchev, resolutely attacking serfdom and defending the oppressed peasantry, made an annihilating criticism of the serf-owning system, exposed the exploiting nature of the wealth of the landlords and serf-owners, the owners of manufactories and traders and justified the right to ownership of land of those who worked it with their labour. Radishchev was firmly convinced that the autocracy and serfdom could be liquidated only by revolutionary means. He worked out a system of economic measures which were progressive for, his time, and the realisation of which would have secured Russia s advance to a bourgeois democratic system.
The Decembrists, in the first half of the nineteenth century, were revolutionaries of that historical period in Russia when the need to replace feudalism by capitalism had ripened. They directed the edge of their criticism against serfdom. Standing forth as fiery partisans of the development of Russia’s productive forces, they considered the abolition of serfdom and the emancipation of the peasants as the most important conditions of this development. The Decembrists not only put forward the slogan of struggle against serfdom and autocracy, but also organised an armed rising against the absolute monarchy. P.I. Pestel (1793-1826) worked out an original scheme for the solution of the agrarian problem in Russia. He drew up a kind of draft constitution, which he called “The Russian Law", envisaging the urgent and complete emancipation of the peasants from serfdom and also economic measures for the defence of the peasants’ interests for the future. For this purpose Pestel considered it essential to create a special public land fund from which each peasant could receive for his own use, without payment, land essential for his existence. This fund should be formed out of part of the land of the landlords and the Government, moreover, part of the land should be alienated from the largest landlords without compensation. The Decembrists, as revolutionaries coming from the ranks of the gentry, were far from the people, but their ideas of struggle against serfdom helped the growth of the revolutionary movement in Russia.
The ideology of the bourgeoisie in their rise to supremacy was formed in conditions of the breakdown of feudalism and the birth of the capitalist order of society. This ideology was directed against the feudal system and against religion as the ideological weapon of the feudal lords. Therefore, the outlook of the bourgeoisie struggling for power had a progressive character in a number of countries. Its most notable representatives-economists and, philosophers-subjected to decisive criticism all the fundamental principles of feudal society: economic, political, religious, philosophical and moral. They played a great part in the ideological preparation of the bourgeois revolution and exerted a progressive influence on the development of science and art.
BRIEF CONCLUSIONS
(1) Feudalism arose on the basis of the disintegration of slave-owning society and the break-up of the village community of the tribes which conquered the slave-owning States. In those countries where there had been no slave-owning system, feudalism arose on the basis of the break-up of the primitive community system. The clan aristocracy and military leaders of the tribes took into their hands a great quantity of lands and distributed them among their followers. The gradual enserfing of the peasants took place.
(2) The feudal lord’s ownership of land and incomplete ownership of the worker in production-the peasant serf-was the basis of the relations of production in feudal society. As well as feudal property there existed the individual property of the peasant and craftsman, which was based on personal labour. The labour of the peasant serfs was the source of the existence of feudal society. Serf exploitation was expressed in the fact that the peasants were compelled to perform week-work for the feudal lord, or to pay him quitrent in kind and in money. The burden that serfdom laid on the peasant was frequently little different from that of slavery. However, the serf system opened certain possibilities for the development of the productive forces since the peasant could work a certain part of the time on his own holding and had a certain interest in his labour.
(3) The basic economic law of feudalism consists in the production of surplus product to satisfy the demands of the feudal lords, by means of the exploitation of dependent peasants, on the basis of the ownership of the land by the feudal lords and their incomplete ownership of the workers in production-the serfs.
(4) Feudal society, particularly in the period of the early Middle Ages, was split into small princedoms and states. The nobility and clergy were the ruling estates of feudal society. The peasant estate had no political rights. A class struggle between peasants and feudal lords took place throughout the whole history of feudal society. The feudal State, reflecting the interests of nobility and clergy, was an active force helping them to consolidate their right of feudal ownership of the land and to intensify their exploitation of the dispossessed and oppressed peasants.
(5) In the feudal epoch agriculture played a predominant part, and the economy had a basically natural character. With the development of the social division of labour and exchange, the old towns which had survived the fall of the slave-owning system revived, and new towns arose. The towns were centres of handicraft and trade. The crafts were organised in guilds which strove to prevent competition. Traders united in merchant guilds.
(6) The development of commodity production, breaking down the natural economy, led to differentiation among the peasants and the craftsmen. Merchant capital hastened the decline of the crafts and promoted the birth of capitalist enterprise-the manufactories. Feudal limitations and territorial divisions acted as a brake on the growth of commodity production. In the process of further development the national market was formed. The centralised feudal State arose in the form of absolute monarchy.
(7) Primitive accumulation of capital prepared the conditions for the rise of capitalism. Huge numbers of small producers-peasants and craftsmen-were deprived of the means of production. Great monetary wealth concentrated in the hands of large landowners, merchants and usurers was created by means of the forcible expropriation of the peasantry, colonial trade, taxes and the slave trade. Thus the formation of the basic classes of capitalist society, of wage-workers and capitalists, was accelerated. More or less complete forms of the capitalist order of society grew and ripened in the womb of feudal society.
(8) The production relations of feudalism, the low productivity of the unfree labour of the peasant serfs, and guild restrictions, hindered the further development of productive forces. Peasant serf risings. shook the feudal system and led to the abolition of serfdom. The bourgeoisie took the lead in the struggle for the overthrow of feudalism. It made use of the revolutionary struggle of the peasants against the feudal lords in order to take power into its own hands. The bourgeois revolutions put an end to the feudal system and established the rule of capitalism, giving scope for the development of the forces of production.
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Part II : CAPITALIST MODE OF PRODUCTION
IV. Commodity Production. Commodities and Money