Life Before Capitalism

( Part 1: The Communist Manifesto | Part 2: Capital, volume 1 | Part 3: Capital in the Twenty-First Century | Part 4: The Conquest of Bread | Part 5: In Defense of Capitalism | Part 6: The Creation of Capitalism | Part 7: Life Before Capitalism )

Here is the logic proof missing from The Conquest of Bread. In these essays, the author lays the groundwork for the theory that, if left on his own, mankind defaults to communal living.

Mutual Aid, by Pyotr Kropotkin

Even in the 1800s, we were combating the idea that mankind is a selfish, warlike being who isolates himself and cares only for his immediate family. We had plenty of evidence then (and more so now) that this is false. Examining history the world over, we find evidence of mankind living in communities whose members supported one another.

We saw how few are the animal species which live an isolated life, and how numberless are those which live in societies, either for mutual defence, or for hunting and storing up food, or for rearing their offspring, or simply for enjoying life in common. We also saw that, though a good deal of warfare goes on between different classes of animals, or different species, or even different tribes of the same species, peace and mutual support are the rule within the tribe or the species; and that those species which best know how to combine, and to avoid competition, have the best chances of survival and of a further progressive development. They prosper, while the unsociable species decay.

It is evident that it would be quite contrary to all that we know of nature if men were an exception to so general a rule: if a creature so defenceless as man was at his beginnings should have found his protection and his way to progress, not in mutual support, like other animals, but in a reckless competition for personal advantages, with no regard to the interests of the species. To a mind accustomed to the idea of unity in nature, such a proposition appears utterly indefensible.

 

Is society built upon competition, or is cooperation the norm among the animals?

On the subject of mutual aid, I think of a recent example. Sharks have been observed bringing others to have their hooks removed.

There always were writers who took a pessimistic view of mankind. They knew it, more or less superficially, through their own limited experience; they knew of history what the annalists, always watchful of wars, cruelty, and oppression, told of it, and little more besides; and they concluded that mankind is nothing but a loose aggregation of beings, always ready to fight with each other, and only prevented from so doing by the intervention of some authority.

Hobbes took that position; and while some of his eighteenth-century followers endeavoured to prove that at no epoch of its existence—not even in its most primitive condition—mankind lived in a state of perpetual warfare; that men have been sociable even in "the state of nature," and that want of knowledge, rather than the natural bad inclinations of man, brought humanity to all the horrors of its early historical life,—his idea was, on the contrary, that the so-called "state of nature" was nothing but a permanent fight between individuals, accidentally huddled together by the mere caprice of their bestial existence. True, that science has made some progress since Hobbes's time, and that we have safer ground to stand upon than the speculations of Hobbes or Rousseau. But the Hobbesian philosophy has plenty of admirers still; and we have had of late quite a school of writers who, taking possession of Darwin's terminology rather than of his leading ideas, made of it an argument in favour of Hobbes's views upon primitive man, and even succeeded in giving them a scientific appearance. Huxley, as is known, took the lead of that school, and in a paper written in 1888 he represented primitive men as a sort of tigers or lions, deprived of all ethical conceptions, fighting out the struggle for existence to its bitter end, and living a life of "continual free fight"; to quote his own words—"beyond the limited and, temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of existence."

Even in the 1800s, research showed that human civilization was based upon cooperation in small communities rather than constant warfare with one’s neighbors. Conflict happened, certainly, but only after every other option was exhausted.

The very persistence of the clan organization shows how utterly false it is to represent primitive mankind as a disorderly agglomeration of individuals, who only obey their individual passions, and take advantage of their personal force and cunningness against all other representatives of the species. Unbridled individualism is a modern growth, but it is not characteristic of primitive mankind.

From prehistory through antiquity through the middle ages through the modern era, we find evidence of humans forming collectives. Tribes, clans, villages, guilds. Much writing has been devoted to the monarchies, but very little attention has been paid to what the people were doing.

As the Kabyles already have private property, they evidently have both rich and poor among them. But like all people who closely live together, and know how poverty begins, they consider it as an accident which may visit every one. "Don't say that you will never wear the beggar's bag, nor go to prison," is a proverb of the Russian peasants; the Kabyles practise it, and no difference can be detected in the external behaviour between rich and poor; when the poor convokes an "aid," the rich man works in his field, just as the poor man does it reciprocally in his turn.(34) Moreover, the djemmaas set aside certain gardens and fields, sometimes cultivated in common, for the use of the poorest members. Many like customs continue to exist. As the poorer families would not be able to buy meat, meat is regularly bought with the money of the fines, or the gifts to the djemmaa, or the payments for the use of the communal olive-oil basins, and it is distributed in equal parts among those who cannot afford buying meat themselves. And when a sheep or a bullock is killed by a family for its own use on a day which is not a market day, the fact is announced in the streets by the village crier, in order that sick people and pregnant women may take of it what they want. Mutual support permeates the life of the Kabyles, and if one of them, during a journey abroad, meets with another Kabyle in need, he is bound to come to his aid, even at the risk of his own fortune and life

The Middle Ages lacked knowledge of science, but that didn’t mean everyone was cruel to one another. If you’re like me, you grew up with Disney’s The Sword in the Stone’s opening narration describing the Dark Ages as a time when men lived in fear of one another, for the strong preyed upon the weak (a dark age indeed! Age of inconvenience! No plumbing! No electricity! No nothing!) but pop culture knowledge of the middle ages comes from the Romance writers of the 1800s. Most of the records come from the capital cities, where the monarchies controlled the narrative. Life was not like that for the rest of the country, and certainly not in the cities the monarchies did not directly control.

Sociability and need of mutual aid and support are such inherent parts of human nature that at no time of history can we discover men living in small isolated families, fighting each other for the means of subsistence. On the contrary, modern research, as we saw it in the two preceding chapters, proves that since the very beginning of their prehistoric life men used to agglomerate into gentes, clans, or tribes, maintained by an idea of common descent and by worship of common ancestors. For thousands and thousands of years this organization has kept men together, even though there was no authority whatever toimpose it. It has deeply impressed all subsequent development of mankind; and when the bonds of common descent had been loosened by migrations on a grand scale, while the development of the separated family within the clan itself had destroyed the old unity of the clan, a new form of union, territorial in its principle—the village community—was called into existence by the social genius of man. This institution, again, kept men together for a number of centuries, permitting them to further develop their social institutions and to pass through some of the darkest periods of history, without being dissolved into loose aggregations of families and individuals, to make a further step in their evolution, and to work out a number of secondary social institutions, several of which have survived down to the present time.

The image of people working under feudal lords and barons is not a complete picture of the middle ages. People living in the countryside were vulnerable and succumbed to the demands of a landowner for protection, so they labored for his benefit. What happened in cities was far different, and yet we don’t talk about it. Life before the industrial revolution. Before capitalism. Before central authority.

The hatred of the burghers towards the feudal barons has found a most characteristic expression in the wording of the different charters which they compelled them to sign. Heinrich V. is made to sign in the charter granted to Speier in 1111, that he frees the burghers from "the horrible and execrable law of mortmain, through which the town has been sunk into deepest poverty" (von dem scheusslichen und nichtswurdigen Gesetze, welches gemein Budel genannt wird, Kallsen, i. 307). The coutume of Bayonne, written about 1273, contains such passages as these: "The people is anterior to the lords. It is the people, more numerous than all others, who, desirous of peace, has made the lords for bridling and knocking down the powerful ones," and so on (Giry, Etablissements de Rouen, i. 117, Quoted by Luchaire, p. 24)

...

When, under the successors of Conrad, the land was the prey of interminable feuds between the nobles, the Westphalian towns concluded a league against the knights, one of the clauses of which was never to lend money to a knight who would continue to conceal stolen goods.(22) When "the knights and the nobles lived on plunder, and murdered whom they chose to murder," as the Wormser Zorn complains, the cities on the Rhine (Mainz, Cologne, Speier, Strasburg, and Basel) took the initiative of a league which soon numbered sixty allied towns, repressed the robbers, and maintained peace. Later on, the league of the towns of Suabia, divided into three "peace districts" (Augsburg, Constance, and Ulm), had the same purpose. And even when such leagues were broken,(23) they lived long enough to show that while the supposed peacemakers—the kings, the emperors, and the Church-fomented discord, and were themselves helpless against the robber knights, it was from the cities that the impulse came for re-establishing peace and union. The cities—not the emperors—were the real makers of the national unity.(24)

Individual townships remained autonomous in the face of the rising force of the centralized state authority. Monarchies had authority over the land, but even the king was powerless to assert complete authority over the countryside, and cities had autonomy to such a degree that the king needed to send delegates to negotiate with it. Who had authority in the large cities? Guildsmen. People who performed a craft and formed unions to protect their own interests.

The author asserts that the evidence of communal living is overwhelming. Wherever people lived together, they supported one another.

Europeans came to work out in medieval times a new form of organization, which had the advantage of allowing great latitude for individual initiative, while it largely responded at the same time to man's need of mutual support. A federation of village communities, covered by a network of guilds and fraternities, was called into existence in the medieval cities. The immense results achieved under this new form of union—in well-being for all, in industries, art, science, and commerce—were discussed at some length in two preceding chapters, and an attempt was also made to show why, towards the end of the fifteenth century, the medieval republics—surrounded by domains of hostile feudal lords, unable to free the peasants from servitude, and gradually corrupted by ideas of Roman Caesarism—were doomed to become a prey to the growing military States.

What happened to all of that? Why did the township die off?

The industrial revolution began. Once land became valuable for manufacturing, governments and noble families began seizing the communal lands. Without the commons, people had no choice but to seek work in the new factories.

If people supported one another, they would have no reason to submit to working in a factory, but if the state passed laws forbidding communal ownership, then people would have no choice but to act as individuals seeking employment from landowners.

Why? What was the point?

Simple: to take control of the labor of the masses, as documented by Sir James Steuart. He wrote that the populace works and the State sees no benefit. People are working for themselves, but with a few changes they could be made to labor for the benefit of the State. The new factories provide a way for the government to produce goods for export abroad, from which the State can benefit.

This is the purpose of Capitalism: to rob people of their autonomous, communal lives and force them to work for a purpose directly beneficial to the monarchy.

Perhaps Kropotkin is correct. Absent outside forces compelling people to labor for the greater good, mankind defaults to communal living.

What we are living under now, from the 1700s through the present day, is an interruption in the normal mode of human existence. The industrial revolution changed everything, and the populace has forgotten what it has lost. Without an upper class forcing humans to labor for a purpose contrary to their community, mankind will default to looking out for one’s neighbors.

We still idealize this kind of life, when we knew our neighbors and the town was the world. To see our neighbors suffer was to suffer with them, and we all helped one another. When we made something, we sold it to people we knew, so we wouldn’t dare make something shoddy. Bonds to the community kept behavior in check. Removing community from human interaction is the cause of crime and poverty.

We don’t want iPhones and Teslas if it means millions of people must be forced into poverty so shareholders can reap dividends. We don’t want AI datacenters that benefit no one but a handful of corporate elites.

We want to work for our own benefit.

Kropotkin argues that communism is just that: a return to mankind’s default state, where everyone works not only for himself but to elevate the community.

Mankind survived for thousands of years without a central authority directing the labor of the masses. Think what human beings are capable of now that we have scientific knowledge of the world. If our labor wasn’t diverted into pointless, wasteful tasks, what could we achieve?

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Pyotr Kropotkin sounds like a great man. I wish I could have known him.