Slavery

Throughout human history, the development of tools, machinery and techniques that increase the productivity of human labour - whether it was irrigation, the horse-drawn plough, or the invention of factory production - increased the size of the population that societies could support. It also increased the extent of specialisation and the ‘division of labour’.

The type of society we live in is based on the way production is organised. The ancient slave societies, for example, were based on the exploitation of slave labour on a massive scale. Large cities where wealthy landowners lived were supported by huge numbers of slaves – mostly captured in war – who worked the land and made most of the goods, such as oil, wine, pottery and jewellery, that made those societies so rich.

The use of slave labour to produce the necessities of life freed up those classes benefiting from the enforced labour of others to develop science, philosophy, art and literature. We still marvel at some of the culture created under these societies today.  Some new forms of technology were introduced, such as the water wheel. However, at this stage in history, as production of goods was mainly carried out through cheap and easily available slave labour, it was an economic system where there was no great incentive to develop new technology to increase the productivity of labour.

In time, the powerful empires that grew on the basis of slavery began to come up against the limits of that economic system, notably the costs of the wars required to acquire more slaves. Divided and weakened, they were overrun and disintegrated.

Slavery has existed in other periods as well, including in some forms today. The brutal, racist exploitation of the transatlantic slave trade from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century is particularly prominent in people’s consciousness. The feudal monarch of England, Queen Elizabeth I, sponsored the first English attempts to profit from it as far back as the 1560s. Later on, the huge profits made from that slave trade played a significant role in funding the early industrial revolution in Britain. It was in this context that Marx wrote in ‘Capital’ ³³ that capitalism came into existence “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

To justify this brutal subjugation of African peoples, racist ideas were developed by the new merchant capitalists and the plantation owners. Racism acquired a conscious and generalised character, becoming part of the ideological armoury of the ruling class. It was then further refined to justify the expansion and consolidation of colonial empires under imperialism and as a tool to ‘divide-and-rule’ working class opposition to capitalist rule.

But it was in the pre-feudal, ancient slave-based societies where slaves formed the primary and central workforce of society as a whole, to the extent of being the main defining feature of the mode of production, although eventually becoming the main limiting factor on further economic progress too.

Feudalism

Feudalism was the economic system of production that eventually superseded slavery. It was based on the labour of serfs, peasants who produced food on small plots of land and who were forced to give a certain proportion of their produce to the feudal lord who owned or controlled that land. That surplus taken by the lord could take on other forms too, for instance by the peasant doing a certain number of days of labour on the lord’s land, or through paying rent.

The landowning aristocracy was the ruling class under feudalism. Although the state usually centred around the monarchy, the royal family was generally drawn from the landowning aristocracy and followed its interests. Feudal monarchies around the world usually defended their privileges and power by leaning on religious ideas and institutions. In feudal Europe the Church supported the monarch’s ‘divine right’ to rule and declared that ordinary men and women had no right to question a monarch who had been chosen by God.

Just as with the era of slavery before it, the mode of production under feudalism eventually became a fetter on further progress. Improvements in agricultural methods and the clearing of forests and other areas to provide more land for cultivation had enormously increased agricultural productivity but could go little further under the feudal system of small peasant plots exploited by feudal lords.

Poor harvests and inflation in the price of luxury items put pressure on the lifestyle of the feudal aristocracy. They in turn tried to squeeze more out of the peasantry, demanding rent in money rather than in the form of grain or labour.

In 1348 the Black Death epidemic struck Europe. It is estimated that 40-60% of the population of England died, and later outbreaks added to the toll. This created a shortage of labour in the countryside that gave the peasantry more power in their ongoing struggle with the feudal lords, who were forced to allow better conditions and lower rents. There were many peasant struggles and uprisings, such as the widespread ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ in England in 1381.

The landless poor, who were forced to work for others in order to survive, were able to demand better wages, both in the countryside and in the towns. That layer grew as some peasants escaped the feudal manors, and others were driven off their land by feudal lords who turned their land over to sheep farming, desperate to get some of the huge profits from rising wool prices. Many landless labourers moved to the towns to seek work.

As the feudal ruling class sank into decline, the embryo of a new society was beginning to form in the towns. Encouraged by growth in long-distance trade, artisans and merchants gathered at town markets to sell their goods. Artisans also found buyers for their goods locally, particularly among the feudal lords and the richer peasants.

The towns in England – and most of Western Europe – had relative freedom from direct control by the feudal lords and soon the artisans and rich merchants were forming guild organisations and corporations to protect their own interests.

These processes – growth in the production of goods to sell at market and the increasing crisis of feudal power in the countryside – reinforced each other. Town guilds and corporations were beginning to introduce capitalist relations, employing a growing army of labourers working for wages, the basis for the capitalist mode of production.

In England, the feudal system had already begun to reach the limits of its development in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But, despite the growing economic power of this embryonic capitalist class, and its presence in parliament, the government and legal system of England were still based on the interests of the feudal aristocracy. It would require the revolutionary change brought about by the English civil wars of 1642-1651 to replace the feudal ruling class with a capitalist ruling class.