August 2024 – Ecological Era

The Gens and Private Property

The level of ignorance towards the native Americans, and other peoples like the early Romans and Germans who were in the lower stages of barbarism, is something common to modern conditions. The lack of knowledge of the kinship structure of man in this condition was part of the effort to root out these often matrilinear family systems.

Clearly history shows that the monogamous patriarchal family we know now is a historical product, part of the class structure, and the level of technological development.. It was not until men began to acquire property, according to Friedrich Engels in his book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, that it became necessary to remove the matriarchy that was ruling in previous conditions, when men just fished and hunted and had little or no property as we know it, and the women did the domestic work, that the general breakdown of the society governed by the system of gens begins.

Prior to the formation of the state, the society was ruled by the gens, or kin, groups. There was little or no real property, men were just starting to become pastoral. When people domesticated cattle society began to move towards patriarchy; the men were taking care of the animals, rather than just hunting and fishing, the domesticated animals becoming the basis of property.

As the labour of herding fell to the man, and the property connected to it was his, it was inevitable that soon the men would overpower the matriarch that was part of early barbarism, and replace it with the patriarch. When property could be inherited, when a man’s possessions could remain property of someone even though its owner was dead, the transfer of power away from inheritance in the gens only began to transform society further away from gentile society. Having the inheritance switch from the matriarch and her family to the man’s sons, marked the end of matriarchy.

At this point money is invented, based first of cattle which was used as money, then the precious metals. This allowed for debts to form, and mortgages on property begin to form. Classes are now formed, and the society is forced to create a mechanism to protect the class structure. This organization is called the state. This form of society quickly replaced the gens., the corrosive power of private property and money starts to dissolve the old kinship group, especially the matriarchy.

Prior to the state the gens protected its members if they were sick, or if there was crime. There was the right of vengeance for murder, but beyond this there were little laws in the gens; there was no theft, burglary, fraud etc. as there was little property.

The state completely overrules the gentile society, and classes are formed, often of landowners and later hereditary nobility forms. The Romans reached this point, and the longing for a return to life under the gens was part of why the German Odacer, who was a barbarian, could overpower Rome, where the state was formed. People longed for the old gentile society, before usury and large landowners, to return.

But after Rome fell to the Germans, the land became private property, and the gens was unable to survive. The amount of land the Germans found themselves with hastened the end of gentile society. The Germans could not control all the land they now owned and nobility came to be resorted to for territorial control. The longing for a return to the gentile life was impossible to satisfy; the state was formed, and in a short period of time, the peasants were in the same condition they were under the Romans.

Slavery was part of ancient culture under the Romans. Large scale agriculture was heavily reliant on slaves, when Rome fell the land was parceled out to individuals. But it was not passed down to the gens as inheritance, and soon there were usurers and large landowners. It is at this point a new feature of society develops, a person whose job is to exchange products for another, the merchant. The commodity is developed, production is for society rather than for one’s self. Handicraft had preceded this, and production was still primarily for oneself and family. With money it becomes possible for production to be for exchange purely. The merchant provides the commodities now, everything exchanged gradually becomes more of a commodity with the intervention of money.

The state comes along the whole way. It reaches its apex of power with the condition of civilization we know now. An instrument developed as a mechanism to maintain the class structure, it survives on taxes. It even borrows money as bonds, it debts, are traded on the stock market;. speculation on the states debts becomes common.

Manufacture is the intermediate state between what we know now as heavy industry, and handcraft. Manufacture starts when handicrafts are replaced by groups of people producing for money, under a single individual. The commodity is formed, the producer no longer produces for himself and his small family, he doesn’t know who will be consuming the product he helped produce.

This gives way to large industry, where the producer uses machinery, and his race or sex are not barriers to the capitalists who own the machinery, the women and children are all used by the capitalist. The producer does not own the means of production, its efficiency at producing a surplus is the reason it is used. It does not matter to the capitalist who works the machinery, it is often the man who is not working due to fear of rebellion by him against the state. His children are less likely to rebel, so are used for labour. His wife is in the same position. The same mechanism that caused the patriarchy to form now is taken to the point of dissolution. Private property comes to be its opposite, the producer is propertyless. At best he owns a small home in a city, he is the modern proletariat.

Divorce becomes easier with women working. There are less impediments to divorce by the woman, she no longer has to ask the man’s permission to divorce. Property also falls in half to the woman. Large scale industry seems to be a return of the woman to power, at least as more equal than in previous historical conditions to the male. As he owns no real private property, there is less dominance as things were when the patriarchy formed.

It is at this point we leave off at. But first a word about the state. Formed due to classes, it begins to die out as the means of production gradually come to be controlled by the workers, and become not owned by anyone, at least not by a capitalist.. A socialist society without class would seem to be the antithesis of the organization created to maintain class, the state. If there is no class, what does the state become? What would it be for?

Perhaps like the capitalist state what remains is the security mechanism, the police for shoplifting etc., but not in control of industry. A socialist society would still have to have security, but just because industry was no longer controlled by capitalists it does not follow industry must be owned by the state. Rather it is not owned by anybody, the state just keeping it from being looted etc.

Engels conclusion in the book mentioned above, the state is to maintain classes is completely right. It seems inevitable it will be less powerful as classes are less a dominant force in society. Unfortunately, it looks like society has a long way to go before the state as we know it becomes a thing of the past

Nicholas Jay Boyes

Milwaukee Wisconsin

American Democratic Republic

Monopoly, Trusts., Joint Stock Companies. Imperialism. Ecological Consciousness and Materialism. 8 1 2024

In Vladimir Lenin’s book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, he talks about how the system of capitalism gets away from competition and free markets, only to be replaced by trusts, joint stock companies, and state ownership of production.

This seemed like new territory, but if you read Friedrich Engels Anti- Duhring, you can see that in Karl Marx and Engels time there were already trusts, monopolies, and joint stock companies. By the late 19th century, there was already concentrated ownership of the means of production, and crisis due to overproduction was a reality. There had been a crisis about once every ten years, and every time ownership became more concentrated, until there were large trusts and monopolies.

Engels’ Anti- Duhring was published in 1878, Lenin’s Imperialism the Highest Form of Capitalism was published in 1917. Engels’ observations of the direction modern industry was going was pretty much dead on; by 1917 most large industry in Europe and America was in trusts, or monopoly.

In this respect Lenin’s observations, although nothing new to Marx and Engles, show the strength of Engels work; he was able to predict the progression of capitalism, from handicrafts, to manufacture, to large industry, then to joint stock companies. He also predicted the demise of capitalism, and the shift to employee ownership and nationalization without compensation by the workers.

But the point I’m making is Lenin did not discover all he wrote in his book about imperialism, rather Marx and Engels had already shown what trusts and joint stock companies represented by 1875.

Lenin was a gifted thinker, and had a good understanding of Marxism. By 1917 he grasped what Marx represented, and his book in 1902 What is to be Done? shows he had a knowledge of social democracy in Germany, and was at the beginning of his writing as a Marxist.

What Lenin learned from Engels was the theory of social progression, from the early stages of capitalism, when production was by individuals, or a family unit, for instance raising sheep, shearing wool, using the spinning wheel to make yarn and weaving it etc., then Engels and Marx trace this production, referred to as handicraft production, to the presence of the merchant, who at first trades the surplus from the family, the wool in our example, and provides money and access to goods the individuals doing the handicrafts could not get, often from far away.

The next step is the merchant and property owner begins to put together production in larger groups, manufacture. The individual weavers, doing handicraft labour, are replaced by a collection of individuals producing not for themselves, but socially. This is the first stage of commodity production, handicrafts are replaced by collective production, rather than for immediate consumption by the individual who created the product, controlled by a capitalist.

The next stage is large industry, where it is production of commodities, but instead of workers simply put together to produce commodities by dividing up the work, it is replaced by machinery. The labour is made simpler, the job now working, for instance, a power loom, where the wool is milled by a large machine, and skill is less important, it is a low skilled job primarily. The worker does not own the loom, rather works for a capitalist, who obtains his product without exchange with the labourer , at least not as any commodity he is selling.

But the exchange of the commodity is the same as it was under the manufacturer ; the person in charge of the manufacture still simply trades his product for its value. Its value is the amount of labour required to produce it, regardless of whether or not it is paid for.

And in all commodity production the worker does not own the means of production, and the exchange of the commodity labour power means the worker does not receive the entire value of the commodity he produces, rather part of the value is kept by the capitalist as surplus value.

Large scale industry makes massive collective production a necessity, competition forces the capitalist to invest in ever larger machinery, further making it impossible for the worker to ever be able to purchase the means of production. The producers work on machinery they do not own, and ownership of the means of production remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Every invention to save labour is used to compel the worker to labour more, to create an ever larger amount of surplus value for the capitalist.

This is the point where capitalism becomes dominated by joint stock companies and trusts. The trust is when a few large companies control an entire production process, and as a monopoly determine the price of the product, rather than by supply and demand, and competition.

The latter was already happening by the time Engels wrote Anti During in 1875. Lenin saw this stage in 1917, as he had left Russia as an exile. Russia was still an agricultural country just coming out of feudalism and serfdom in 1902, when Lenin wrote What is to be Done?.

But by a strange confluence of factors, Russia had a revolution in 1917, and Lenin was chosen to lead it. It was an early attempt to put the ideas of Marx and Engels into practice.

But the center of these ideas remained Western Europe, as it was here the worker had experienced these stages I mentioned above play out in real history. In retrospect, we should have seen the shift from trusts and monopoly ownership to the next stage, social ownership, would never really be understood in Russia. What they tried to do was skip a stage in society, to go from agriculture and manufacture directly to socialism.

What they built lasted about 75 years, and was for its time a remarkable achievement. But by 1989 their vision of socialism was faltering, and without a strong movement in the west where large scale industry was in the form of trusts and monopoly, and partial state ownership in the joint stock company as a buyer and owner of shares, a capitalist arrangement, society began to falter,. When Russia returned to capitalism, industry became owned again, sold off at absurd prices to capitalists. Russia could no longer practice the socialism they tried in vain to produce.

The ecological movement was rooted in large industry, satellites to record the warming, for instance, and the windmills and solar panels to stop it. It was tragic; by 1989 Russia was exporting petroleum, nuclear energy, and metals. When the Chernobyl nuclear reactors melted down, it was clear a main export was a disaster waiting to happen. In time even Germany would scrap nuclear power altogether, as the Fukushima reactors in Japan, built by America’s General Electric and Japan’s Hitachi., also melted down.

This left Russia with a dangerous export nobody wanted: Russian reactors. But the return to capitalism in 1991 did not make the Russians any more free of nuclear energy, and they’re still trying to export what is basically the same technology used in Chernobyl.

The Americans and the French are still trying to build nuclear energy, but a reactor now costs about 10 billion dollars to produce, putting in question if it is an investment to make a profit or a doctrinaire experiment.

Russia did not make the transition to renewable energy before or after the fall of socialism there. Compounding their problems was they had put massive investments in petroleum production, drilling oil with no real concern for ecology. When it became clear climate change was coming, the pumping of oil the main cause, Russia was reverting to capitalism.

And instead of producing renewable energy, Russia just kept pumping as much oil as possible for export. They never even looked back.

Russia has yet to start a recycling program, and its metals production suffers from this. The end of socialism did not bring recycling. Whether their exports of metals are even competitive is questionable; the ecological cost of production cannot always be materially measured. What does a strip mine for bauxite really cost?

Had Russia kept trying to build socialism, they may have become ecological. But what they went through proved the opposite. What they built for its time was once state of the art, but without experience of capitalist ways, gained through centuries of living under capitalism in Britain, France and their colonies, the latter built for capitalism, Russia was destined to fail.

The failure of Russia was not due to a failure of Marx and Engels. At worse we can say ecological thinking was in its infancy then, in Anti- Duhring ecology is only starting to be mentioned. For example the dreams of modern sewage filtration, and the embrace of Charles Darwin in Anti-Duhring.

But the socialism of Russia seemed to have no ecological compass,it was designed as a paradise for humans. But as far as Marx and Engels theories go, they clearly saw the direction the society was taking. Lenin only sharpened the ideas of the 19th century about trusts and monopolies being in control of this stage of capitalism. But Marx and Engels remain the founders of thought about what modern capitalism represents. That will not change, the only thing different today is ecological. Industry has moved forward allowing us to pollute less, and understand our symbiotic relationship with ecology. It is not a matter of man’s mastery of nature, this effort was coming to a close in the 21st century. What we have learned is without ecological consciousness, industry is impossible. Clearly decomposition is the heaviest industry, and recycling and composting precisely this. If man had mastery of ecology we wouldn’t be having a climate change problem, clearly symbiosis with nature is the answer, rather than crude mastery through destruction of ecosystems. The question becomes if we ask workers to pressure their boss to , for instance, use less petroleum. Does this sound like a good idea? Should we be surprised when he no longer can ask his boss for ecological progress?

It is left to the workers on their own to fix ecology. Asking the bourgeoisie for concessions results in physical suffering by the worker, following him for the rest of his life. They never forgive anyone who questions their authority, for instance asking them to use less petroleum. It is a compelling reason why capitalism will never reform itself.

Nicholas Jay Boyes

Milwaukee Wisconsin

American Democratic Republic

8 1 2024