Concept Review
Excerpts
Timeline
Concept review
Productive forces
The productive forces over the period 1400 - 1800 remained primarily the same, qualitative change coming only with the introduction of steam power in the late 1700s.
Agriculture was the primary form of production. Plows were used to till the land, windmills and later waterwheels, animals and, of course, human manual labor were the means of getting work done. This was the case in Europe as well as the colonized Americas. Gold and silver increasingly challenged land as the dominant form of wealth, provided first by the gold and silver mines of South and Central America. As the triangular trade took off with the colonies, particularly because of sugar, what Marx identified as the period of manufacture assisted in making production more efficient in order to meet the growing market for goods. This involved improvements in technology, but was accomplished primarily by reorganizing the methods of production to make labor more efficient. It also involved the development of the commercial end of things, such as banking systems, lines of credit, bookkeeping and accounting, all things which assisted in facilitating this developing world economy.
Productive relations and property relations
As the world economy developed, so too did the relations of production begin to change. The productive relations of feudalism revolved around the lord and the serf. Slavery had been an integral part of economic life since the rise of private property and must be viewed on a continuum with other forms of coerced labor, serfdom and the lives of most peasants included. It became crucial to the hand-in-hand development of capitalism and the expansion of the world economy. Slavery provided the colonizers with labor (for gold and silver, for sugar and later for cotton) as well as unprecedented profits from the trade itself.
As the economies of different nations were increasingly organized around commodity production and trade for a world market, the old feudal productive relations began to break down.
With the introduction of steam power in the late 1700s, the stage was set for the rapid expansion of industrial production, wage labor and the rise of new classes - the bourgeoisie and the working class. In Europe, there began a struggle for power with the old feudal order which ended in the triumph of the bourgeoisie and the reorganization of the world around wage labor.
In the US, the process began first with a struggle to free the colonial ruling class from England’s rule. With the advance of industry in the North, a struggle developed between two sections of the bourgeoisie. The political dominance of the system based on agriculture and slavery (based in the South) was increasingly challenged and overthrown by the rising system based on Northern industry and free labor. This was the meaning of the Civil War.
Superstructure
The development of the idea of race went through stages as well, ones which coincided with but were not in an automatic relation to the productive relations. As the excerpt from Moving Onward points out, "us" and "them" designations always existed. The Greeks referred to those who were not Greek as barbarians, the Christians divided the world between "believer" and "heretic." With the struggle over territory in Europe and markets based in that territory, the concept of 'race' and 'nation' began to be seen as a means of uniting peoples in the pursuit of these goals. Increasingly, race and nation were linked to something internal, inherent, something which made one peoples superior while another inferior.
As nations sought to expand their wealth through overseas exploration, conquest, plunder and colonial exploitation, the concept of race and nation became irretrievably fused to the domination, conquest and exploitation of not just "inferior peoples", but "inferior peoples" of color. As African slavery spread to meet the labor needs of the Americas, the wider the spread of the concept of race.
These ideas were used to facilitate the control and exploitation of both whites and blacks. The early colonial ruling class, fearful of rebellion and unity by white indentured servants and black slaves extended privileges to whites while at the same time tightening slave codes and passing laws that kept the two groups separated.
The ideas of race were increasingly consolidated after the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, which allowed for the expansion in cotton production and required more land in cotton and more slaves to work that land. "Scientific" views arose to justify this expansion of slavery and the consolidation of the slave system. These same views sought to justify US imperialist expansion under the banner of "Manifest Destiny" and to justify the poverty of poor whites. Legal, political, social and religious institutions were built upon and further developed to protect the system of slavery and the ruling class that benefited from it.
The introduction of steam power and the growth of industry prompted a growing schism between the two regions of the country, one based on slave labor and agriculture, the other based on free labor and industry. Thus resulted the "irrepressible conflict," the American Civil War.
The victory of the Northern financiers and industrialists over the Southern slave oligarchs abolished legal slavery, but did not put an end to the ideology of race. Cotton remained central to the American economy. Yet, while steam power had revolutionized industry there was no accompanying technology that could replace the old means of planting, tending and picking this still extremely profitable crop. That would have to wait until the invention of the mechanical cotton picker in the 1940s. As a result, blacks were thrown into a new form of slavery and southern whites were dragged down with them. The ideology of race was reshaped to hold both sets of workers down for yet another stage in history.
The mechanical cotton picker destroyed sharecropping and the need to hold millions to the land setting in motion the conditions in which African Americans historical struggle for equality intersected with the post-world war II interests of a section of the capitalist class. Just as reforms were won, a new technology once again began to be introduced which began to change the face of American, indeed, world society. Only this time, the technology was not the foundation for reforming capitalism, but of undermining its very existence and laying the basis for a world in which all peoples -- regardless of color or wherewithal in life -- to share equally in the fruits of human society.
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Excerpts
K. Marx and F. Engels excerpts are from M. Solomon, Marxism and Art
The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure - political forms of the class struggle and its results ....juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development in to systems of dogmas – also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner connection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as nonexistant, as negligible) the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise, the application of theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.
– Frederick Engels to J. Bloch, 1895
Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life.
– Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class, which is the ruling material force of society, as at the same time its ruling intellectual force. ...The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.
– K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, 1846
The same men who establish social relations in conformity with their material productivity, produce also principles, ideas and categories, in conformity with their social relations. Thus these ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products. There is a continual movement of growth in productive forces, of destruction in social relations, of formation of ideas; the only immutable thing is the abstraction of movement...
– Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry an impulse never before known, and there by to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
– Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848
Direct slavery is as much the pivot of our industry today as machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery no cotton; without cotton, no modern industry. It is slavery which has made the colonies valuable; the colonies have created world trade; world trade is the necessary condition of large-scale machine industry. Thus, before the traffic in Negroes began, the colonies supplied the Old World with only a few productes and made no visible change in the face of the earth. Slavery is therefore an economic category of the highest importance.
– Karl Marx to Pavel Yasilyevich Annenkov, December 28, 1846
Race, and its companion ideas, racism and white supremacy, aren't ideas that sprang up out of nowhere. Like all ideas and attitudes, they grew out of the material conditions of society that invented them. They were created along with the development of capitalism. They took root as the capitalist system became the dominant form of economic and social relations; they were consolidated and spread with the worldwide expansion of that system through imperialism.
-- Brooke Heagerty and Nelson Peery, Moving Onward: From racial division to
class unity
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Timeline
1400 - 1800 Making of a new world
Means of production:
1400-1800s: plow, windmill, water power, animals, manual labor
late 1700s: introduction of steam power
Productive relations:
Feudal system: serfs and lords
Rise of capitalism, development of wage labor, commodity production, bourgeoisie
Superstructure:
Ideas: "Us & Them" mentality, color not organizing factor
Development of race & nation
Race and nation tied to color
1500: exploration, conquest and colonization begins
Voyages of discovery and conquest
- Europe economic competition with rest of world
- Conquest of Americas foundation for rise of capitalism
Use of native mining for labor, some agriculture, some use of African slavery.
Rise of ideas of race and nation
- Need to establish unity to consolidate national territories, and states.
- "Race" and "nation" linked to "blood," biology, something inherent. Belief that some are better than others, superior and inferior.
As slave trade begins to take off color question takes off
- Debate over Indians in Caribbean and South and Central America
- Debate over African blacks.
Idea of 'white' European; white as an important idea.
1600 King Sugar
Development of sugar trade based in Caribbean.
Decimation of indigenous peoples.
Use of African slavery takes off: Need for huge amounts of labor: 1 slave needed for every 2 acres of sugar, 1 slave fore very 5-10 acres of cotton, 1 slave for every 30-40 acres of corn.
In Europe, agriculture revolution, throwing people off the land, growth in poverty; people sold themselves into indentured servitude in the Caribbean and North American colonies.
Triangular Trade accelerates development of world capitalism:
- rise of banking, finance, credit systems
- development of bourgeoisie based in trade & manufacturing
- improved technology, reorganization of production
1700 Cotton and the slave trade
Cotton develops as key crop in North American colonies.
White indentured servants and black slaves (with some free blacks) primary labor source.
Need to guarantee exploitation and control of whites and blacks in common conditions.
- Common conditions among white servants and black slaves
- Colonial ruling class fearful of rebellion; some rebellions of blacks and whites take place.
- Extend privileges to whites; tighten slave codes and laws that keep two groups separated.
1793: invention of cotton gin allows for the consolidation of the slave system
- expansion of cotton production
- growth in need for land in cotton, slaves to work
1800 - 1865: Slave system consolidates
"Scientific" views arise to justify expansion of slavery
- Humans originate from different sources, not a common creator as Christianity had historically stated.
- "Races" displayed fixed and eternal characteristics, some meant to be ruled (such as black slaves) some to be their rulers (such as rich whites)
- These views also justified colonial conquest under idea of US "Manifest Destiny" to justify poverty among poor whites.
Legal, political, social and religious institutions developed to protect the property relations.
Conflict between needs of system based on industry/free labor and system based on agriculture/slavery lead to Civil War.
The resource papers:
Paper #1: Science and Doctrine
Paper #2: Marxism as the Scientific Current Within Communism
Paper #3: How and Why Things Change
Paper #4: The Shape of History: Historical Materialism, Electronics and Value
Paper #5: Revolutionaries – The Role of the Individual
Paper #6: Revolution – The Line of March
Paper #7: Applying the Science of Society: The African slave trade, capitalism, and the ideology of race
Paper #8: Applying the Science of Society: The World Prior to 1492
Paper #9: Historical Materialism: The Civil War in the United States
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