The current condition of society, modern culture, is a relatively recent phenomenon. It was only 1865 when it became illegal to own a human being.
It is hard to say that when slavery was present it was not a stage of barbarism. Slavery has its roots in the barbaric period of society, primarily in the mid to upper levels of barbarism. It would seem that black slavery was the higher stages of barbarism, eventually replaced by capitalism.
A slave was not paid. That is the most basic essence of slavery, the slave worked for a master who owned him, and was used as forced labour. In the east slaves were used for domestic purposes, for instance by the Muslim Arabs until fairly recently.
“Slavery was formally outlawed in Saudi Arabia in 1962 by a royal decree from King Faisal.”
Google search: What year did Saudi Arabia abolish slavery?
Christianity and Islam have much in common. Slavery was practiced in the New World from its discovery by Europeans. It lasted about 400 years; Spain and France were Catholic countries; clearly the ideology of the slave master was Catholicism.
The British practiced slavery in the New World too, they were Protestant Christians. Canada was the exception, black slavery was never practiced there. But the practice was present in America, and continued unabated for 91 years after independence.
The revolution did not abolish slavery. The feudal system of economics reigned supreme, with slavery practiced. Society was still barbaric. It wasn’t until 1863 slavery started to end.
It was replaced by capitalism; it was cheaper to hire a freeman to create commodities than a slave. Slaves escape, and when this occurred the owner was out the value of money he paid for the slave. They also had to be fed and clothed, and it was cheaper to have a freeman paid as wage labour than to have a slave to labour.
But barbarism is still partially present in capitalism. The practice of part of the day being worked with no pay may be an advancement from the whole day’s labour being unpaid, but the practice of working for a master and not being paid part of the day has lingered on into modern society.
It is precisely this relationship that capitalism is based on. It is rooted in the upper stages of barbarism, patriarchal society. The arrangement common to barbarians, slavery, was present in the New World. The slaves were for labouring on large farms, as opposed to Arab domestic slaves I mentioned earlier in this article. Domestic slavery took place in the New World too, but working slaves were more common in the west.
The lower stages of barbarism were a more civilized arrangement. Native Americans owned little property, and hunted and fished as a means of living for thousands of years before the upper stage of barbarism reached them, when Spain, France and Britain arrived. What they found was a matriarchal society with no state, at least nothing like what we know of as the state. There was little property, and no fraud or extortion. Society was organized in gens, familial and tribal. A good description of this is found in Friedrich Engels The Origin of the Family, State and Private Property.
The upper stages of barbarism also practiced genocide. Extermination of the native Americans can hardly be considered civilized. To qualify that though, the Holocaust should show us just how far we are from barbarism. Clearly we are still in the upper levels of barbarism.
Ecological society comes at and after the late stages of barbarism. Part of this is when the mechanism that creates the surplus value is uprooted, when the state machinery is placed in the museum. The state is the mechanism which, paid for with surplus value, the class structure is maintained. It is slowly going away, as less and less people own property, like joint stock company paper.
Another form of barbarism is the practice of polluting air and water by non metric industry. And it should be obvious the Republican bourgeoisie are still most connected to ownership of these primitive operations, periodically bailed out by the state.
Legal rights to pollute the ecology are a part of barbaric modern culture. Although pollution is inevitable, barbarism and modernism condone it.
An ecological society will outlaw pollution altogether, recycling and composting are part of this. These two movements came about out of ecological necessity rather than as a surplus value producer for capitalists. It may cause pollution to recycle, but it is a recognition of man’s effects on ecology to attempt to remove pollution. It does not condone pollution, rather accepts it as inevitable sometimes. Making it legal leads to modern ideas of trading carbon emissions, in other words condoning pollution, just making the more primitive pollution causing factories to have to pay for the right to pollute the air and water. The fact it is traded on the stock market should be enough to tell us where this is going. Society will no longer condone any pollution, but it will still pollute the ecology, the pollution will not be traded on the stock exchange, speculated on to create a profit.
The feudal system of property, when it was acceptable to own a human being, is only a little over a century away. In Asia minor it is only 63 years away. Modern society still retained wage labour; work for a master with no pay for part of the day. Ecological ideas came in the late modern period. Society will come to relate to ecology as a process of symbiosis, rather than as a source of resources to be exploited by capitalism for surplus value.
Nicholas Jay Boyes
Milwaukee Wisconsin
American Democratic Republic
9 17 2025
Ecological Era 