In order to define the decadence of capitalism, our approach will be as follows:
- by looking at the main social transformations of the historical process we will draw out the general concept of the decadence of a mode of production; we will then apply this general concept to the specific case of capitalism and try to deduce the political consequences that flow from it.
- and, in doing this, we will, like Marx, consider first “the material transformation of the economic conditions of production”, and secondly “the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophical - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out”.
The form of social organisation at the beginning of humanity was what Marx
called ‘primitive communism’. Despite important local differences in climatic, historic,
or other elements, the essential traits of primitive societies were the
collective ownership of the means of production (essentially the land) and
collective labour in agriculture and the hunt, the products of which were
shared equally amongst the whole population. The idea that private property is
something inherent in human nature is just a myth popularised by bourgeois
economists since the 18th century; its aim is to present the capitalist system
as the most natural one, the one that best corresponds to human nature.
On the other hand, these
egalitarian relations were not the product of an ideology of brotherhood or the
work of a God anxious to ensure equality between his creatures. It was humanity’s
lack of power faced with a natural environment that could be as hostile as
man’s techniques were feeble, which imposed this need for social cohesion,
forcing men to live in communities that used their means of production in an
egalitarian way. The egalitarian ideology which did exist was a consequence of
these relations and not their cause:
“The mode of production of material life dominates in general the development of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men which determines their existence, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness (Marx, Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy).
In the same way, the disappearance of primitive communism wasn’t the result of ideological changes but of the disappearance of the material conditions which had engendered such a society. If one examines the way in which these egalitarian societies were transformed into societies of exploitation, with the appearance of classes and of private property, it becomes evident that it was the result of progress in the techniques of production.
We will leave aside the cases where this ‘progress’ was the result of the civilising work of European colonial massacres from the end of the 15th century onwards.
In different regions of the globe, and in various local historic conditions, primitive communist societies disintegrated and ceded their place either to the asiatic mode of production or slavery.
Slavery When a community exhausted the fertility of its territory, or when its game had departed, or when its population grew too large in relation to its means of survival, it was obliged to extend or remove its domination to new territories. In regions where the density of population was relatively high - in the Mediterranean for example - such expansion could only be made at the expense of other communities.
In the beginning, wars provoked as a result of these movements could only take the form of gratuitous massacres or cannibalism. Their sole aim was to seize the land of conquered peoples. As long as the level of social productivity only permitted a man to produce just enough for his own individual subsistence, the conqueror had no interest in integrating new mouths into the hungry community. It only became feasible for a conquered people to work for their conquerors, for free and by force, while at the same time producing enough for their own subsistence, when the productivity of labour had reached a certain level [1] [1].
Primitive communist relations were thus abandoned in order to make use of a higher level of productivity in a context of wars and conquests.
This badly understood economic system was in general the result of the need of certain communities to face up to the problems posed by nature in certain regions (aridity, floods, monsoons, etc). In such regions communities were very quickly forced to study the cycles of nature and to undertake irrigation works to assure their livelihood. The complexity of these works, the technical knowledge they required, the need for an authority to coordinate them, engendered layers of specialists (priests, versed in the study and observation of nature, were often at the origin of these castes). Charged with a specific task in the service of the community, these specialists - appearing to be the creators of new wealth - tended to constitute themselves into a ruling caste. They progressively appropriated the social surplus at the expense of the collectivity. The development of the productive forces transformed these servants of society into exploiters.
The ‘Asiatic’ mode of production left the communal relations of production unchanged, as basic cells of production. The ruling class only appropriated the surplus created by the work of these communities. But a first transition from primitive communism had been made. The need to apply new techniques of production resulted in the emergence of new relations of production and the abandonment of the old.
The introduction of new techniques of production later on did away with the remnants of egalitarianism in these societies. Thus, for example, the problem of fertilising the land, the necessity to create a more intimate link between the worker and the earth, often led to to an abandonment of the systematic redistribution of plots according to custom or the needs of families. The necessity to ensure a greater continuity in the maintainence of plots, or the weight of fiscal pressures, resulted in the passage from communal to private property. And with the latter, inequality slowly developed, until a part of society had to work on the richest plots for a fraction of the resulting production. Society became entirely stratified, taking the form of a society of serfdom or feudalism.
But whether they gave way to slavery or oriental despotism (and the latter in its turn to serfdom), communist relations caved in under the pressure of the progress of the productive forces, which could no longer adapt to the old framework.
“At a certain stage of their development the productive forces enter into collision with the existing relations of production or with the property relations within which they worked hitherto” (Marx, ibid).
The result of a development of the productive forces in the particular regions where one people conquered another, slavery allowed the appropriation by one social group of the surplus labour realised by the rest of society. The owners of slaves, as a ruling class avid for profit and privileges, became the motors of the development of the productive forces. However, this development was strictly limited to wars of conquest, mainly taking the form of a growth in the number of slaves and of great works that facilitated the pillage of conquered countries. It was on this basis that ancient Greece and Rome developed their civilisations.
The Roman slave economy - the decadence of which opened the door to feudalism - was founded on the pillage and exploitation of conquered peoples. The latter furnished Rome with its essential means of subsistence (food, tribute and slaves). It often happened that the goods imported were produced under different modes of exploitation, such as the Asiatic mode of production. But the metropole itself subsisted on slavery, the latter being applied above all in wide-scale exploitation (olive groves and stock farming) and in the great works.
These works often served military needs, being used in the exploitation of colonies (roads, viaducts, etc). At the same time they reflected the concern to ensure the luxury of the ruling class.
Thus political power was most often connected with the triumphant military caste. Economic prosperity was therefore closely dependent on the warlike capacities of the metropole.
The great development of Roman civilisation corresponded to its period of victories and conquests. Its zenith was reached when Rome dominated the Mediterranean world and pocketed the profits. In the same way the onset of Roman decadence was marked in the second century AD by the end of this expansion, and in the third century by the Empire’s first defeats (in 251 the Emperor Decius was defeated and killed by the Goths; in 260 the Emperor Valerian was taken prisoner and humiliated by the king of Persia. In the course of the third century revolts in the colonies broke out simultaneously for the first time).
The difficulties of maintaining such a gigantic empire with the limited technical means available at that time explains in part the end of Rome’s expansion. But above all it was the gap between the economic productivity of Roman slavery and that of its colonies (which often developed a superior productivity under the Asiatic mode) which ensured that the revolts in the colonies would ultimately be successful.
Slave relations of production were characterised by low labour productivity. In the conditions of the epoch, a growth of productivity required the improvement of methods for working the earth - the utilisation of the plough, the development of fertilisation and the creation of an intimate link between the worker and the soil, providing the worker with a motive for using these techniques of production. But such progress demanded the abandonment of slavery, in which the worker is maintained by his master whatever his productivity, and in which only the fear of punishment forces the slave to produce, so that he works with the least care possible.
Slavery was only profitable as a means of exploiting conquered peoples. Once these conquests stopped or diminished, once the sources of booty, tributes and slaves dried up (in turn leading to a rise in the value of slaves), slavery transformed itself into an unprofitable system, a fetter on the development of production.
The need to pass on to new productive relations led, in the metropole, to the appearance of feudal types of exploitation, in which the great proprietors ceded much land to free families in exchange for a part of their produce. But the surpassing of slavery also involved an attack on the privileges of the ruling class. The ‘collision’ between the development of the productive forces of society, and the relations of production that had existed until then, precipitated Rome into its phase of decadence.
The development of production slowed down or stopped: “They (the wealthy Romans) ‘gleaned’ the products of the mines and undermine the soil, allowing pastures or forests to disappear in semi-arid regions. Manpower was exploited without a break, stimulating discontent and apathy in work. They even forbade the application of new methods, and neglected irrigation works and drainage in regions where they were essential....War, epidemics and starvation reduced the population of the Empire by a third. The death rate was perhaps even higher in Italy itself during the course of the third century" (Shepard B Clough, Grandeur and Decadence of Civilisations, Editions Payot p140)
Following slavery or the Asiatic mode of production, the feudal system allowed a new scope to the productive forces of society for centuries.
In autarkic feudal relations, work on the soil attained unequalled levels of improvement (amelioration of ploughing, shoeing of work animals, of harnessing - at the head or neck instead of the belly - development of irrigation and of fertilisation, etc). Furthermore, and above all, the perfecting of agricultural labour was accompanied by a considerable development of artisan work. The latter existed as a simple appendage of the agricultural economy: supplying instruments of labour and certain items of consumption, essentially for the ruling class (mainly clothing and weapons).
The craftsman benefited from the growth of resources available to the noble class thanks to the development of agricultural productivity. This last factor figured all the more as the noble class wasn’t engaged in accumulation - the particular character of the bourgeoisie - but used all its profit for personal consumption.
But from the twelfth century on feudalism had begun to reach the limits of the possibilities for extending cultivatable surfaces.
“We have enough indices of the lack of land at the end of the thirteenth century to suggest that the extension of cultivatable surfaces was inferior to the national growth of population; and with the exception of certain places, it was probably insufficient to compensate for the tendency for labour productivity to fall. The pressure from land shortages after 1200 in Holland, Saxony, Rhineland, Bavaria and the Tyrol was one of the factors which gave birth to the migrations towards the east, and we can say that at the end of the fourteenth century the limits of acquiring soil from forest land were already reached in the north east of Germany and Bohemia” (Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, p 59).
“The contemporaries of St Louis, and in certain regions those of Philippe de Bel, saw the development of the soil pushed to its limits. The most audacious reclamations were attempted because it was always necessary to feed more mouths and because, not knowing any other way of augmenting the yield, the space cultivated always had to grow. Permanent marshes and wasteland seemed to disappear. Woods shrank. The marshes and fens of the English coast were drained, cleaned, exploited to the limit of what was technically possible...” (J Favrier, De Marco Polo a Christopher Columbus, p 125)
From then society could only break out of its impasse through a new development in the productivity of labour. Now the latter had more or less attained its extreme limits in the context of family artisan production. Only the passage from individual labour to the labour of a number of associated workers, to a more complex division of labour and the utilisation of more complex means of production could in these conditions permit the necessary growth of productivity.
This was possible because the development of artisan work under feudalism also contributed to a revival of the towns, which were the basis needed for more collective forms of labour.
But, fundamentally, the feudal framework was the negation of the conditions which could allow for a real development of this economic form:
- feudalism was founded on the life-long attachment of men to their means of production as well as to their lord, whereas manufacturing demanded great mobility of labour power, and thus a separation of the worker from the means of production;
- feudalism was a system of local power, of autarky, of the closed fief, with innumerable tolls to pay on the passage of commodities through different feudal estates. The manufacturer, by contrast, needed a mobility of raw materials, of commodities in general, so that he could concentrate in one place of production the products from a thousand different places, and ensure the freest possible distribution of his own commodities;
- finally, manufacturing production must base itself on the accumulation and the concentration of profits in order to obtain, replace and then expand the machinery which allows for production based on the division of labour. It requires therefore a spirit of success through work and the right to accumulate the rewards of the latter. Feudal privileges, on the other hand, were based first on the capacity to make war, and after that solely on heredity.
At the level of the capacity to work, the lord was equal or inferior to the serf. Hence feudal society’s contempt for work, which was seen as a form of debasement.
The feudal lord made it a matter of honour to display his ability to consume his entire revenue. The feudal economy ignored and condemned accumulation aimed at the growth of production, an attitude which barred the way to the development of manufacture.
“We can consider that the beginning of the fourteenth century marked the end of the mediaeval economy’s period of expansion. Up till then, progress had been continual in all spheres ... But by the first years of the fourteenth century, all this came to an end. Although there wasn’t a regression, there was no advance either. Europe was, as it were, resting on its laurels: there was stability on the economic front...the proof that the previous economic thrust had been interrupted was the fact that foreign trade ceased to expand...In Flanders and Bravante, the drapery industry maintained itself without increasing its traditional prosperity until around the middle of the century, then it began to go rapidly downward. In Italy, most of the great banks which had dominated the money markets for so long fell into a series of reverberating bankruptcies ... the decline of the fairs of Champagne date from the first years of the century. This was also the time when the population stopped growing, and this constituted the most important symptom of the state of a stabilised society which had reached the final point of its evolution.”
(H. Pirenne, Histoire economique et sociale du Moyen Age, PUF, p 158).
Just as in slavery, the decadence of feudalism meant famines, since the growth of the productive forces was far inferior to the growth in population. Famines were then followed by epidemics, which spread rapidly because of the poor nutrition of the population. Thus from 1315 to 1317 a terrible famine desolated all of Europe, followed thirty years later by the Black Death, which between 1347 and 1350 wiped out one third of Europe’s population.
“It’s true that it was precisely then that countries which had been outside the main areas of economic development, like Poland and especially Bohemia, began to participate in it more fully. But their belated awakening didn’t result in any important consequences for the western world as a whole. It was thus clear that society was entering a period when more was being conserved than produced, and when social discontent testified to both the desire and the incapacity to improve a situation which no longer corresponded to men’s needs.” (Pirenne, op cit, p 158)
Feudal decadence began in the fourteenth century, continuing until the overthrow of its last juridical traces by the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England and France. But from the fourteenth century new relations of production were beginning to dominate society: capitalism. Developing out of a struggle against the old feudal fetters, it was the main beneficiary from the morass of the fourteenth century, and was to allow a great revival of economic life.
[1] [2] The development of wars was an active factor in the abandonment of egalitarian social relations: conditions of semi-permanent warfare demanded the emergence of a layer of specialised warriors who tended to appear as the suppliers of wealth to the collectivity and who thus began to establish hierarchical relations within the community, with the rest of the community ensuring their upkeep. But in itself this factor only became important when the growth of productivity permitted the passage to slavery.
The development of the productive forces has two aspects:
1. The growth of the number of workers incorporated into production at a given level of productivity;
2. The development of labour productivity amongst a given number of workers.
In a system in full expansion, one can see a combination of both. A system in crisis is a system which has reached it limits in both aspects at the same time.
We can speak of an ‘external limit’ to the expansion of a system (its incapacity to enlarge its field of action) and of an ‘internal limit’ (the incapacity to go beyond a certain level of productivity). Consider the case of the end of slavery, of the Roman Empire. The external limit was constituted by the material impossibility of enlarging the extent of the Empire. The internal limit was the impossibility of raising the productivity of the slaves without overthrowing the social system itself, without eliminating their status as slaves. For feudalism it was the end of land reclamation, the incapacity to find new arable lands, which acted as the external limit, while the internal limit was its inability to raise the productivity of the serfs, or of the individual artisan, without transforming them into proletarians, without introducing labour associated by capital: that is, without the overthrow of the feudal economic order.
The approach of these two types of limits are dialectically linked: Rome could not expand its empire indefinitely because of the limits of production; inversely, the more difficult it was to expand, the more it was obliged to develop its productivity, thus pushing it more rapidly towards its extreme limits. Likewise feudal reclamations were limited by the level of feudal techniques, while the scarcity of land encouraged more ingenuity in productive activities carried out in the towns and the countryside. This in turn pushed feudal productivity to the border of capitalism.
In the final analysis it is the limits on the level of productivity within the old society which lead it into the morass. It is this productivity which is the true measure of the level of development of the productive forces; it’s the quantitative expression of a certain combination of human labour and means of production, of living and dead labour [1] [3].
To each stage of development of the productive forces, that is, at each overall level of productivity, there corresponds a certain type of relations of production. When this productivity approaches its last possible limits within the system which corresponded to it, and if the system is not overthrown, society enters into a phase of economic decadence. Then there is a snowball effect: the first consequences of the crisis transform themselves into factors accelerating the crisis. For example, at the end of Rome as well as in the decline of feudalism, the drop in revenues of the ruling class pushed the latter to reinforce the exploitation of the workforce to the point of exhaustion. The result in both cases was the growing apathy and discontent of the labourers, which only accelerated the decline in revenues.
Likewise the impossibility of incorporating new labourers into production forced society to support inactive strata who constituted yet another drain on revenues.
A similar phenomenon was the galloping devaluation of money at the end of the Empire as well as at the end of the Middle Ages: “Rome had hoped to cover its governmental expenses by increasing taxation, but when the proceeds proved insufficient it was necessary to resort to inflation (at the end of the Second Empire). This first expedient had to be repeated from time to time in the course of the third century, certain monies being devalued to 2 percent of their face value. The monetary unity of the Empire was destroyed; each town and each province issuing its own money”( Shepard B Clough, op cit, p 141).
And at the end of the Middle Ages: “In a world where the mass of money became insufficient, the wage-bill (of soldiers used for protection against robbery or in wars - ICC note) increased the need for precious metals; thus the temptation to overvalue the cash in circulation. The rulers used their authority to diminish the weight of coins, so that a coin valued at 2 sous henceforth contained less pure silver and more lead, but was now worth 3 sous. This was inflation!”( J Favier, op cit, p 127).
Parallel to these economic consequences the crisis causes a series of social convulsions which in their turn impede an already enfeebled economic life. The development of productivity systematically conflicts with existing social structures, rendering impossible any new development of the productive forces. the need to go beyond the old society is put on the agenda.
“A society never expires before all the productive forces contained within it have been developed” (Marx, op cit).
In fact it should be noted that no system has developed ALL the productive forces - in the proper sense of the term - which it may contain in theory.
On the one hand, the economic consequences that we have seen and the series of social catastrophes which the first great economic difficulties cause are so many fetters preventing the system really attaining its absolute limits. We must bear in mind that an economic system is the ensemble of relations of production that men have been led to establish, independently of their will and in accord with the level of productive forces, to PROVIDE FOR THEIR ECONOMIC NEEDS. Before the last instrument of production has seen the light of day, if production has started to grow less quickly than the needs of the population, the system loses its historic reason for existence, and everything in society tends to push against its confines.
On the other hand, under the pressure of the productive forces, the economic foundations of the new society begin to develop within the old. This only applies to past societies where the class which overthrew them was never the exploited class. Feudalism grew up within the Roman empire. The first feudal plantations in Rome were often headed by old members of the municipal senate put to flight by a state which made them responsible for the collection of taxes.
Likewise, at the end of feudalism, members of the nobility became businessmen, and in the towns - often in struggle against local lords - developed the first manufactories, prefiguring capitalism.
These first ‘centres of the future system’ (great Roman plantations, bourgeois towns) were mostly born as the result of the decomposition of the old system. They attracted all kinds of elements trying to escape the system. But from being the results of decadence, these centres quickly transformed themselves into factors that hastened it along.
Material conditions permit the passage to a new type of society, whose premises already exist within the old society, and their pressure is sufficient to begin the foundation of a new system.
“New relations of production have never been put into place before the material conditions of their existence has been discovered within the old society” (Marx, op cit).
It is not enough that production approaches its final limits within the old society. It is also necessary that the means to go beyond the latter already exist or are in the process of formation. When these two conditions are historically realised, society’s adoption of new relations of production is on the agenda. But the resistance of the old society (of the old privileged class, the inertia of customs and habits, ideologies, religion etc), and the gap that may exist between the realisation of these two conditions, means that such transformations do not take place in a progressive, linear manner, but through a series of regressions, catastrophes, and qualitative leaps.
The phase of decadence of a system is that period in which such a historic leap has not been made; it is the expression of a growing contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production; it is the sickness of a body whose clothes have become too tight.
[1] [4] It is this relation which under capitalism will be partially expressed by the organic composition of capital: c¼v constant capital over variable capital.
When the economy trembles, the whole superstructure that relies on it enters into crisis and decomposition. The manifestations of this decomposition are the characteristic elements of the decadence of a system.
Beginning as consequences of a system, they then most often become accelerating factors in the process of decline. Many a bourgeois historian, having seen the latter phenomenon, deduces from it that the superstructural elements are actually the main causes for the ending of a civilisation.
In this examination of superstructural elements, we will look at four phenomena which can be found both in the decadence of slavery and the decadence of feudalism. We will see that these are no historical coincidences, but definite symptoms of the decadence of a system.
These phenomena are:
1) the decomposition of the ideological forms that reigned in the old society;
2) the development of wars between factions of the ruling class;
3) the intensification and development of class struggles;
4) the strengthening of the state apparatus.
In a society divided into classes, the dominant ideology is necessarily the ideology of the dominant class. The scope for the enrichment and development of its ideological forms depends on the real capacity of the ruling class to persuade the whole of society to accept its rule. A society is only prepared to accept a given ideology as long as the economic system it is based on corresponds to that society’s needs. The more an economic system ensures prosperity and security, the more the human beings who live by it will identify with the ideas that justify it. In conditions of expansion, the injustices inherent in the economic relations can appear as no more than ‘necessary evils’; the belief that everyone can benefit from the system permits the development of democratic ideologies, above all within that part of society which benefits from it the most - the ruling class (the regime of the Republic corresponded to the most flourishing period of the Roman economy; in expanding feudalism, the king was merely a suzerain, elected as the first among equals).
Law itself is relatively little developed because the system corresponds sufficiently to the objective needs of society for most problems to be resolved by allowing things to take their course.
The sciences tend to develop, philosophy leans towards rationalism, towards optimism and confidence in mankind. Since the ugly side that belongs to any exploitative society is relatively well hidden by the state of prosperity, ideologies are less encumbered by the need to hide reality and justify the unjustifiable. Art itself tends to reflect this optimism and usually has its best moments in the periods of economic development (what is referred to as the ‘golden age’ of Roman art corresponds to the main period of the growth of the Empire, for example; similarly in the prosperous days of the 11th and 12th centuries, feudalism went through an immense artistic and intellectual renewal.
But when the relations of production turn into a straitjacket for the life of society, all the ideological forms corresponding to the existing order lose their roots, are emptied of content, and are openly contradicted by reality. In the decadence of the Roman empire, the ideology of the political power took on an increasingly supernatural and dictatorial form. In the same way feudal decadence was accompanied by the reinforcement of the idea of the divine origins of the monarchy and the privileges of the nobility, which were being severely battered by the mercantile relations being introduced by the bourgeoisie.
Philosophies and religions express a growing pessimism; confidence in mankind gives way to a fatalism and obscurantism (eg the development of Stoicism then of Neoplatonism in the Lower Roman Empire: the first talked about the elevation of man through pain, the second denied the capacity of man to grasp the problems of the world through reason).
The end of the Middle Ages saw the same phenomenon:
“The period of stagnation saw the rise of mysticism in all its forms. The intellectual form with the ‘Treatise on the Art of Dying’, and above all, ‘The Imitation of Jesus Christ’. The emotional form with the great expressions of popular piety exacerbated by the influence of the uncontrolled elements of the mendicant clergy: the ‘flagellants’ wandered the countryside, lacerating their bodies with whips in village squares in order to strike at human sensibility and call Christians to repent. These manifestations gave rise to imagery of often dubious taste, as with the fountains of blood that symbolised the redeemer. Very rapidly the movement lurched towards hysteria and the ecclesiastical hierarchy had to intervene against the troublemakers, in order to prevent their preaching from increasing the number of vagabonds...Macabre art developed... the sacred text most favoured by the more thoughtful minds was the Apocalypse.” (Favier, op cit, p 152f).
All this reflected the growing gap between the relations reigning in society and the ideas about them which men had hitherto held to.
The only ideologies which could really develop in these periods was law, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ideologies which announced the new society.
In a society divided into classes law can only be the expression of the interests and will of the ruling class. It is the totality of rules that permit the proper functioning of the system of exploitation. Law goes through a period of growth at the beginning of the life of a social system, when the new ‘rules of the game’ are being established; but also at the end of a system, when reality rends the system ever more unpopular and inappropriate, and the ‘will’ of the ruling class becomes the most important thing keeping the old relations going. Law then represents the necessity to reinforce the oppressive framework necessary for the survival of a system that has now become obsolete. This is why law developed both in Roman decadence and during the decline of feudalism (Diocletian, the greatest Emperor of the Lower Empire, was also the one who produced the greatest number of edicts and decrees. Similarly from the 13th century onwards, the first collections of customary laws began to appear).
Parallel to this phenomenon there appear ideas advocating new types of social relations; they take on critical, rebellious and finally revolutionary forms. They are the justification for the new society. This phenomenon was particularly evident from the 15th century on in western Europe. Protestantism, particularly the form preached by Calvin, was a religion which, as opposed to Catholicism, allowed for the lending of money on interest (crucial for the development of capital); which taught spiritual elevation though work and glorified the successful man (thus opposing the ‘divine’ origins of the privileges of the nobility and justifying the new situation of the ‘parvenu’ bourgeois businessman); which put in question the supernatural character of the Catholic church (the main feudal landholder) and advocated the interpretation of the Bible by man without any intermediary. This new religion was an ideological element which announced and hastened the rise of capitalism.
Similarly, the development of bourgeois rationalism, whose ultimate expression was in the philosophers and economists of the 17th and 18th centuries, expressed the revolutionary element of the conflict into which society had entered.
Decomposition of the old ruling ideology, the development of the ideology of the new society, obscurantism against rationalism, pessimism against optimism, coercive law against constructive law, here, as Marx said, we find “the juridical, political, religious, artistic, philosophic, in short, the ideological forms through which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out”.
The prosperity of a system of exploitation allows there to be relative harmony between the exploiters, and thus there can be ‘democratic’ relations between them. When the system ceases to be viable, when profits diminish, harmony gives way to wars between the profiteers. Thus, in parallel to the brigandry that characterised the end of the Roman Empire and the Middle Age, there was a proliferation of wars between factions of the ruling class.
In Rome from the second century onwards there was a series of wars fought by knights, bureaucrats and army chiefs and senators and patricians:
“Between the years 235 and 285, out of the 26 Emperors who succeeded each other to the throne, only two died a natural death, and at one moment there were up to 30 claimants to the throne” ( SB Clough, op cit, p 142).
At the end of the Middle Ages wars between nobles took on such proportions that the western kings were forced to forbid them, and Louis IX went as far as to forbid the bearing of arms. The Hundred Years War was a phenomenon of this type.
When the ruling class can no longer escape the contradictions of its system and sees its profits declining irreversibly, the most immediate solution is for each faction to grab hold of the wealth of their rivals; or at least to seize control of the conditions of production which allow this wealth to be produced (for example, the fiefs of the feudal epoch).
In the decadence of a system there are three phenomena which make the intensification of class struggles one of the main characteristics of these periods of decline:
- the development of poverty: we have already shown that the end of slavery and feudalism were regularly marked by famines, epidemics and the generalisation of poverty. We have seen what consequences this had within the privileged classes, but it was obviously the oppressed classes which suffered these scourges most intensely; this provoked them into more and more frequent riots and revolts;
- the strengthening of exploitation: we have also shown how in a system in decadence, productivity can less and less be increased by technical means, so that the ruling classes are increasingly tempted to palliate this through the super-exploitation of labour. The latter is used up to the point of exhaustion. There is a whole growth in punishments for those who fail to do enough work...
Added to the poverty and suffering they are already enduring, this last factor can only accentuate the tendency towards the generalisation of struggles between the exploited and the exploiters. The reactions of the toiling classes are so violent, and in the end so damaging to the goal of increasing productivity, that at both in the end of the Roman Empire and in the late Middle Ages, there is a tendency to replace punishments by measures aimed at giving the labourers an ‘interest’ in their work (the emancipation of the slaves and the serfs) [1] [5]
- the struggle of the class that bears within it the seeds of a new society: in parallel to the revolts of the exploited, there is a development of the struggle of a new class (the great ‘feudal’ landowners at the end of the Roman Empire, the bourgeoisie at the end of feudalism), which begins to establish the bases of its own system of exploitation, which sap the bases of the old system. These classes are thus led to wage a permanent combat against the old privileged class.
During the course of this struggle, the revolts of the labouring classes always provides the force that these new classes themselves lack in their effort to supplant the old structures, now become completely reactionary (it’s only in the proletarian revolution that the class that carries within itself the germs of the new society is at the same time the exploited class).
All these elements explain the fact that the decadence of a society necessarily leads to a decisive renewal of class struggles. Thus, in the Lower Roman Empire:
“the situation created by the deficiencies in production, an ever-increasing taxation, the devaluation of the currency and the growing independence of the large landowners had the consequence of further accentuating the political and social disorganisation and of leading to the disappearance of the principles that regulated relations between men...impoverished landowners, ruined merchants, labourers from the towns, colons, slaves, rioters and deserters from the army resorted to pillage in Gaul, Sicily, Italy, North Africa and Asia Minor. In 235 a wave of brigandry swept through the whole of northern Italy. In 238 civil war reigned in North Africa. In 268 the colons of Gaul attacked numerous towns, and in 269 a slave revolt broke out in Sicily” (Clough, op cit, p 142).
“The breadth of the social movements affecting the Latin west in the 5th century is impressive. They shook all regions and especially Brittany, western Gaul, the north of Spain and Africa...” (Lucien Musset, Les Invasions, p 226).
It was the same at the end of the Middle Ages:
“From the end of the 13th century labourers’ riots shook the Flemish towns. At the time of the Hundred Years War and the Italian divisions, it was the upsurge in urban misery that gave rise to the troops of vagabonds that wandered the countryside. It was very often the same kind of people in different countries, men with no land who became men with no work: the ‘Jacques’ of the French plains, the Tuchain of Languedoc, the Lollards of the English midlands, the Mallotins of Paris, the Coquillards of Bourgogne. Daring tribunes exploited their distress and put these revolts at the service of the political ambitions of a social group or individual. Etienne Marcel wanted to impose on the Dauphin the tutelage of a faction of the bourgeoisie...Van Atevelde had exploited the misery of the Flemish labourers, Cola di Rienzo, a ‘tribune of the people’ did the same with the lower orders who had been devastated by the excesses of the Roman aristocracy. In Florence, the revolt of the Ciompi, a hunger revolt, in the end served the interests of the Medicis...Thus, this stagnation, this fruit of divisions, war and social disorder led to pillages, riots and massacres...” (Favier, op cit p 137. See also Pirenne, op cit, p160f).
The revolutions of Cromwell in 1649 in England and the French revolution of 1789 were the spectacular culmination of the struggles provoked by the decline of feudal society and the birth of capitalism.
The history of economic systems can only be the history of the men who live within them. The development, conservation and supersession of a given society are the work of groups of men driven to act according to their economic position within a system. The capacity of a system to sustain itself is above all relative to the strength of the class which draws most profit from it; the strength of a new society is similarly related to the strength of the class which has the most interest in it.
Thus, it’s in the action of social classes that we see the concretisation of the objective forces that have plunged society into a contradiction. At a given moment, the class conflict is none other than the conflict between the reality of the development of the productive forces and the existing relations of production.
If law represents the interests and will of the ruling class, the state is the armed force charged with ensuring that the law is obeyed. It is the guarantor of the order required for the exploitation of one class by another. Faced with the economic and social disorders that characterise the decadent phase of a system, the state can only be reinforced. “The development of the function leads to the development of the organ”.
- Against social disorder: having emerged as the armed force of the ruling class, the state is essentially the servant of a class. However, it’s around this ‘servant’ that we see the clearest crystallisation of all the interests of the ruling class: its task is to maintain an overall, general order. In this sense it has a wider view of the functioning of the system - and of its necessities - than that of the individuals who compose the privileged class. Separated from society as a whole because it is an organ of oppression in the service of a minority, it is also distinguished from this minority by its character as a single, unified organ in contrast to the diversity of the factional or individual interests of the exploiters. Furthermore, the privileges of the state bureaucracy are closely linked to the proper functioning of the system as a whole. The state is thus not only the force that can attain a sufficiently global view of the economy, it is also the only one which has an immediate and vital interest in its good functioning.
Thus in periods of decadence the state is reinforced because it has to deal with a growing number of revolts by the oppressed class, but also because it is the only force that can ensure the coherence of the ruling class when it is pushed towards dispersal or tearing itself apart.
The development of the power of the Roman Emperor, above all from the second century onwards, as well as that of the feudal monarchy, had a real justification both in their respective struggles against the revolts of the oppressed and in their attempts to defend the reigning order by restricting the struggles between factions of the ruling class. The Emperor Septimus Severus (193-211) ended up confiscating “the properties of senators and urban businessmen in order to procure the necessary funds for paying the soldiers who assured his safety and power” (Clough); the Capetian monarchy developed at the expense of the great feudal lords.
In most cases, wars also constitute a powerful factor in the strengthening of the state apparatus. Only the state authority can carry out the regroupment of forces that war demands; the state always emerges stronger from such tests. This factor played a very important role in the strengthening of the feudal monarchy, particularly in France.
- Against economic disorder: It is notable that there was a very strong development of state interventionism both during the decline of the Roman empire and during the waning of feudalism:
“As far as production was concerned, he (the Emperor Dioticien, 284-305) imagined that it could be stimulated by a sort of ‘directed economy’; he regulated the activity of the ‘colleges’, controlled the exploitation of the great estates and established control over prices. Finally, the tax rate was revised and the production of money regulated in order to try to stabilise the currency” (Clough, p 143).
As for the feudal royalty, it strengthened itself by creating a powerful interventionist administration. The development of the bureaucracy was such that the feudal courts ceased to be itinerant and settled down in one city: Paris, Westminster, Pamplona, Moscow. The king used his own functionaries (baillifs and seneschals in France) whose economic tasks grew more and more throughout the realm.
When the economic relations of a society become a calamity for those involved in them, only armed force can keep them going. As the armed force and ultimate crystallisation of the laws of a system, the state then tends to take the economy in hand.
Everything in a decadent society pushes this phenomenon forward: the parasitic costs that derive from the need to maintain an economy that is no longer viable leads to a huge growth in fiscal burdens. Only a strong state can extort such funds from a population that is already hungry and on the verge of revolt. Both the later Roman Emperors and the feudal kings found that this task was one of the main bases for the strengthening of their powers. The economy was no longer in accord with the necessities imposed by social reality; economic initiative no longer had a natural guide in the search for prosperity and harmony with the rest of society. State power, state intervention then became the only means for trying to prevent the paralysis of the economy, a collapse into total disorder. Both at the end of slavery and the end of feudalism, there was a development of tendencies towards the bureaucratisation of society and the systematic control of the individual.
This tendency reached particularly frightful proportions in the period of the Lower Roman Empire:
“Everyone was dissatisfied with their situation and tried to escape from it. The peasant deserted the countryside, the craftsman abandoned his craft, the decurion fled the municipal senate. The state power had no remedy for these problems: all it could do was to try to tie everyone to their condition and close the doors through which they could escape.
The watchword was ‘everyone at their post’ or Roman culture would perish. It was a state of siege, a perpetual siege of life. Social conditions, professions were made hereditary. There was the establishment of a real caste regime; and this wasn’t something primitive or spontaneous, but new, political, imposed from above” (F Lot, Le Fin du monde Antique et le Debut du Moyen-Age, p 109).
Some labourers were marked with red hot irons to stop them abandoning their jobs. The right of pursuit was made general.
This same necessity for state interventionism appears at the end of feudalism. But there was an important difference between the economic action of feudal royalty and that of the Lower Empire.
As it decomposed slavery gave way to a system of autarky, a particularly fragmented economic system. The attempt to centralise and strengthen the state on the one hand, and the development of feudalism on the other, were two simultaneous but quite contradictory phenomena. Feudalism, by contrast, would be superseded by capitalism, that is by a system that required an increasing level of concentration and integration of economic life. The centralisation and interventionism of the feudal state, which resulted from the necessity to shore up a disintegrating feudal system, thus objectively constituted a means for developing the bases of capitalism. Several fundamental factors forced the monarchy to take up this dual historical role:
1) the monarchy often had to call on the support of the bourgeois towns to bolster its power;
2) the interests of the dominant exploiting class, the nobility, could be in relative accord with those of the rising bourgeoisie;
3) the growing strength of the bourgeoisie, which had by the end of the 15th century created the bases of capitalism, enabled it to impose a partition of power on the aristocracy.
The economic measures taken by Edward II, Edward III, the mercantilist policies of Henry VII in England, the economic developments realised under Louis XI in France, the protectionist actions favourable to the development of industry taken by most of the French and English kings from the 14th century onward, as well as the acceptance of bourgeois parliaments by the two monarchies, are all evidence of the eminent role played by the feudal monarchy in the process of the primitive accumulation of capital.
But it would be absurd to see the feudal monarchy from this angle alone. The monarchy remained essentially feudal, in fact it was the last rampart of feudalism. This is attested by facts such as: the constant struggle between the king and the bourgeois parliaments; the defence of noble privileges by the monarch (in France only the commoners paid taxes); the defence of the corporations; the struggle against Protestantism - the ‘religion of the bourgeoisie’ - in France; finally, the very fact that the bourgeoisies in England and France had to resort to revolution to permit a real development of capitalism.
Despite this dual role played by the feudal monarchy, the inexorable reinforcement of the state was aimed essentially at maintaining the feudal system and was a typical feature of a society in decline.
If the image of a society in decadence is that of a body which is pushing against a garment that has become too tight, the development of the state apparatus is simply the attempt of the garment to strengthen itself so that the mounting pressure from the body doesn’t tear it to pieces.
Decomposition of the dominant ideology, the development of wars and revolutions, the reinforcement of the state, these are the most salient characteristics of a society in decadence, a society in which the productive forces are finding it harder and harder to develop. The economic system ceases to be a historic necessity and instead becomes a fetter that plunges society into growing barbarism.
[1] [6] This phenomenon has a particularly interesting significance: when an economic system is at the end of its tether, it is often obliged to abandon certain of its juridical aspects in order to preserve what is essential: the real relations of production
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/pamphlets/decadence/ch1/section1#_ftn1
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/pamphlets/decadence/ch1/section1#_ftnref1
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/pamphlets/decadence/ch1/section2#_ftn1
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/pamphlets/decadence/ch1/section2#_ftnref1
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/pamphlets/decadence/ch1/section3#_ftn1
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/pamphlets/decadence/ch1/section3#_ftnref1