Historical Economics Essay, Research Paper
[ Introduction to Marxism ]
Introduction to Marxist theory
on history
Historical Materialism: the marxist view of
history
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of
class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian,
lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word,
oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to
each other, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now
open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a
revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the
mutual ruin of the contending classes.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: The Communist Manifesto
Section A: How society works
1. Making sense of history: looking behind the ’story’
The ruling class portrays history as the doings of “great men”, the role of
governors and explorers, lists of wars and invasions and other “important
events”. History in school books is like a story – a succession of events
without any general pattern.
Marxists say that in order to make sense of the story of history – what
people, famous or not, actually did – we have to understand the overall
economic and social context to show why they acted in the way they did.
Take for example the American Civil War of 1861-65. What do most
people know about this war? Northern Americans, the Union, fought against
the Southern Confederates; Bluecoats fought Greycoats. Why?
Most people would say, well, it was about slavery. The Union president,
Abraham Lincoln, was against slavery, while the southerners were in favour
of it. That’s the myth; the northerners fighting slavery out of the goodness of
their hearts. But Marxists would say there was a lot more to it than that. In
fact the northern industrialists behind the Union were in bitter conflict with
the big southern farmers who owned the slaves; most of these industrialists
were racists and not very sympathetic to black slaves. The basic causes of
the war were in this economic conflict between the to different sections of
the US ruling class.
Let’s take the example of the English civil war of 1641-49. Most people
know it was cavaliers against roundheads, parliament versus the crown,
Oliver Cromwell versus Charles 1. But why? Who did parliament represent
– whose interests? And who backed the king, and why? When we
investigate this, we find that different class forces were involved. So, a
Marxist analysis of the English civil war would try to explain the story of the
war in terms of the class interests involved.
This method of looking at things to discover the real class and social interests
involved in events, of course is relevant to more contemporary events. Why
did the US president George Bush start the Gulf war? To defend plucky little
Kuwait against the monster Saddam? Marxists say no, this was just the
propaganda; Bush started the war to defend the economic and political
interests of the US, including the oil supplies from the area. Another example
of how we try to look behind the surface events at the real story.
So this is the first idea: Historical materialism is about discovering the class
interests which determine how people act in history. Now read the following
quote about the English civil war from someone who fought in it, and think
how it relates to what we have discussed so far:
“A very great part of the knights and gentlemen of
England … adhered to the King. And most of the tenants of
these gentlemen, and also most of the poorest of the
people, whom the others call the rabble, did follow the
gentry and ere for the king. On the Parliament’s side were
(besides themselves) the smaller part of the gentry in most
of the counties, and the greatest part of the tradesmen and
freeholders and the middle sort of men, especially in those
corporations and counties which depend on such
manufactures”.
(Colonel Baxter: Autobiography)
What Baxter is saying here is that the conflict was between the king and the
aristocracy (supported by those most dependent on them) on the one hand:
and the rising middle classes on the other. This of course is exactly the
Marxist explanation of the Civil War. (See Christopher Hill: ‘The English
Revolution 1640′).
2. Different types of society
The type of society we have now – capitalism – only started to come into
existence about 350 years ago, first in Holland and England. But human
society existed for hundreds of thousands of years before that. In societies
before capitalism, the way people lived was different to what we know now.
Before capitalism, in Western Europe and in China and Japan before the
arrival of the Europeans, the system which existed was feudalism. Instead of
today’s capitalists who own firms and employ workers for a wage, under
feudalism the ruling class was the aristocratic nobility – the lords – based on
large estates in the countryside. The oppressed class, instead of workers
earning a wage, were the peasants (serfs) doing agricultural work on the
lord’s estate. They had their own plots of land, but they had to work for the
lord for part of the week or give part of their own produce to the lord.
In Europe, before feudalism the predominant form of society was slavery -
the type of society of classical Rome and Greece. The majority of people
were literally owned by the ruling nobles, doing manual labour on the land
(although some slaves worked in the towns), having no rights of their own.
From these few examples we can see that as society evolves, as it gets
richer, the way it is organised changes. The examples we gave here are all
examples of class society, where there were rulers and ruled. However,
before slavery there were other forms of society where there was no ruling
class – something which the capitalists today don’t like to think about.
Marxism tries to analyse each society in terms of how it began, how it
worked and how it was replaced by another type of society.
The basic form of organising any society, the way its economy works,
Marxists call the mode of production. Below we will try to explain this a bit
more.
Marx tried to explain these two things (class interests and mode of
production) in the following passage – one of the most famous in all his
writings. Read it a couple of times and try to get the gist (NB. Marx and
Engels, in common with their contemporaries, always talk about “men” rather
than “people” – we should make the translation).
“In the social production of their life, men enter into
definite relations which are indispensable and independent
of their will, relations of production which correspond to a
definite stage of their material productive forces. The sum
total of these relations constitute the economic structure of
society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and
political superstructure and to which corresponds definite
forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of
material life conditions the social and intellectual life
process in general. It is not the consciousness of men which
determines their being but on the contrary, their social
being which determines their consciousness.”
(From the Preface to ‘A Critique of Political Economy’ of
1859)
3. The mode of production of hunter-gatherer society
So far we have seen that Marxists say the following things:
1.History has to be analysed according to the different social and class
interests at work,
2.There are different types of society, and that society changes
over time,
3.The basic way that society is organised is called the mode of
production.
Let’s think about point 3) in a bit more detail and try to relate it to the quote
from Marx. If you understand this bit, you’ll have Marx’s key to
understanding human history in your hands.
Marx says that in order to produce their livelihood, people enter into
“definite relations” and these are “indispensable” and “independent of their
will”. All peoples through history have lived in societies and co-operated
with one another to produce the food, clothes and shelter they need to
survive.
As far as the politicians and social engineers of today are concerned, society
is just made up of individuals and their families. The A.L.P. don’t believe in
the existence of the working class – only this or that kind of voter; the
sociologists divide people into income brackets, but have no idea about
social organisation. But, even when the first humans were tribes roaming the
African plains in search of food, they had a definite form of social
organisation and collaborated with one another to gather and hunt.
But the fact remains that hunting and gathering is a hard way to earn a living -
the whole tribe had to work every day to eke out a living. There was no
room for slackers. The only division of labour was based on gender and age,
and indeed, the early tribes were extended families.
If Kerry Packer dropped out of the sky and landed in a hunter-gatherer
society, he’d have to go out and hunt with the rest of the tribe or he’d go
hungry; and if he tried to set up a firm and make a profit from other people’s
hunting he’d be sorely disappointed, because after the hunters and their
families had been fed, there’d be nothing left over by way of profit and he’d
still go hungry.
Let’s suppose that the land in a particular country is particularly bountiful or
the hunters particularly skillful and the hunters and gathers produce enough
to keep themselves and their children and old folk and have a little over to
spare.
We know that under these conditions special roles developed in tribal
society – there were priests and chiefs that had the time to study the stars
and the seasons, have fine clothes made for them, carry out social and
cultural affairs etc., and these people all enjoyed a privileged position by
being free from labour and became “mini-rulers” of one kind or another.
If a sociologist from a university were to come across such a society, they
might write learned papers about the customs and religion etc., or any
number of things, but the key to understanding what is going on in such a
society is not these kind of things, but the way they organised themselves to
produce their livelihood – and that little bit extra.
Imagine if a group of Militant members were to find themselves living in
such a society; no doubt they would share everything equally, work
cooperatively, making all decisions with discussion and voting, etc., and form
what we could call a “primitive communist” society.
But their choice would be very limited. One thing they couldn’t do, even if
they wanted to, is set up a capitalist society.
The fundamental wealth of society, the productive technique and division of
labour are not sufficiently developed. With a small number of people simply
hunting and gathering, you can’t have firms, banks, shareholders, capital or
capitalism. The productive forces are just not sufficiently developed.
This hints at another important point we shall come back to: the social
relations, the type of society, has to “fit” the level of development of the
productive resources.
4. Classes and exploitation: the Neolithic Revolution
In Section 1 we talked about three different types of society which have
existed in western Europe during the past 5000 years: slave society,
feudalism and capitalism. In other words, very different types of class
societies have existed during this period. Slavery, feudalism and capitalism
are all characterised by having a ruling class which owns or controls the land,
materials, equipment etc. used for production, what Marxists calls the means
the means of production. Through their ownership or control of the means of
production, the ruling class is able to exploit the labour of the oppressed
class, whether these are slaves, serfs or proletarians under capitalism.
But before slave society, for hundreds of thousands of years, people had
organised themselves into clans and tribes which had no ruling class
exploiting the others. Of course, many of these clans and tribes had chiefs
and elders with authority: but they were not an economically privileged social
layer, not a class. Stable social classes, which involves exploiters and
exploited, are a product of the great change which took place in human
society about 6,000 years ago. This was the most fundamental change in
human history, called the Neolithic Revolution. What happened?
To cut a long story short, in the area which is now Iraq (Mesopotamia),
people developed a settled form of agriculture. Instead of roaming around
killing animals and picking berries, they learned how to domesticate animals
and grow crops. They became farmers. Of course, at first this was a hard
struggle. But over time, they learned that this was much more economically
productive. Instead of always having to struggle just to produce what they
needed to live on, they began to produce a surplus. They started to live in
settlements, which gradually became bigger, leading to the first cities.
The surplus they produced was not of course big enough for everyone to
double or treble the amount they consumed. Gradually, a layer of priests
emerged who began to take the leading role in organising the new
settlements and taking control of and using the new economic surplus. The
priests were the core of the first ruling class, organising society so they could
snaffle the economic surplus that had been produced.
Another thing we should note about the Neolithic revolution: as society gets
richer, as the first towns and cities are built, then production gets more
complicated. As farming gets more efficient, less people have to do farming.
Others are freed up to become artisans, producing goods like pottery and
jewellery, in the towns. In other words, different types of jobs appear, things
get more specialised: Marx said that the social division of labour got more
complex.
Now another quote: it’s from Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, a brilliant man who
wrote Class Struggles in the Ancient Greek World:
“Class (essentially a relationship) is the collective social
expression of the fact of exploitation, the way in which
exploitation is embodied in the social structure. By
exploitation, I mean the appropriation of part of the
product of the labour of others… . A class is a group of
persons in the community identified by their position in the
whole system of social production, defined above all
according to their relationship (primarily in terms of their
degree of ownership or control) to the conditions of
production (that is to say to the means of production) and
to other social classes… . The individuals constituting a
given class may or may not be partly or wholly conscious
of their own identity and common interests as a class, and
they may or may not feel antagonism to members of other
social classes.”
What Ste Croix is getting at is that you can’t separate classes from
exploitation: if you have an upper and a lower class, one is exploited by the
other. And that takes place through the control or ownership of the means of
production.
5. Summary to Section A: the rulers and the ruled
At this point, you should look back at the quote from Marx. He is saying
that the basis of every society is how people organise to produce their
livelihood, and in every society this is done in a definite and specific way,
giving rise to certain relations of production. In class societies, these
relationships are about control and ownership of the productive process,
about exploitation. Exploitation in turn is about controlling the product of the
labour of others, to appropriate the economic surplus created. Here is
another quote in which Marx says the same thing in a slightly different way:
“The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus
labour is pumped out of the producers determines the
relationship between the rulers and the ruled . . . It is
always the direct relationship of the owners of the
conditions of production to the direct producers – a
relationship naturally corresponding to a definite stage in
the development of the methods of labour and thereby its
social productivity – which reveals the innermost secret,
the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it