File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9802, message 32


Date: Wed, 04 Feb 1998 10:24:07 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Marxism and stages


These are all the sentences in the final chapter of Engels' "The Origin of
the Family, Private Property, and the State" that contain a reference to
stages. The chapter is titled "Barbarism and Civilization", which speaks
volumes in itself.

1) In conclusion, let us examine the general economic conditions which
already undermined the gentile organization of society at the upper STAGE
of barbarism and with the coming of civilization overthrew it completely.
Here we shall need Marx's Capital as much as Morgan's book.

2) Arising in the middle STAGE of savagery, further developed during its
upper STAGE, the gens reaches its most flourishing period, so far as our
sources enable us to judge, during the lower STAGE of barbarism. We begin
therefore with this STAGE.

3) But humanity did not everywhere remain at this STAGE.

4) At the earlier STAGES only occasional exchanges can take place;
particular skill in the making of weapons and tools may lead to a temporary
division of labor.

5) In no case could exchange arise at this STAGE except within the tribe
itself, and then only as an exceptional event.

6) Now the chief article which the pastoral tribes exchanged with their
neighbors was cattle; cattle became the commodity by which all other
commodities were valued and which was everywhere willingly taken in
exchange for them -- in short, cattle acquired a money function and already
at this STAGE did the work of money.

7) Horticulture, probably unknown to Asiatic barbarians of the lower STAGE,
was being practiced by them in the middle STAGE at the latest, as the
forerunner of agriculture.

8) Of the industrial achievements of this STAGE, two are particularly
important.

9) But in the main it must have occurred during this STAGE.

10) The next step leads us to the upper STAGE of barbarism, the period when
all civilized peoples have their Heroic Age: the age of the iron sword, but
also of the iron plowshare and ax.

11) At the lowest STAGE of barbarism men produced only directly for their
own needs; any acts of exchange were isolated occurrences, the object of
exchange merely some fortuitous surplus.

12) In the middle STAGE of barbarism we already find among the pastoral
peoples a possession in the form of cattle which, once the herd has
attained a certain size, regularly produces a surplus over and above the
tribe's own requirements, leading to a division of labor between pastoral
peoples and backward tribes without herds, and hence to the existence of
two different levels of production side by side with one another and the
conditions necessary for regular exchange.

13) The upper STAGE of barbarism brings us the further division of labor
between agriculture and handicrafts, hence the production of a continually
increasing portion of the products of labor directly for exchange, so that
exchange between individual producers assumes the importance of a vital
social function. 

14) At our STAGE of development, however, the young merchants had not even
begun to dream of the great destiny awaiting them.

15) The settled conditions of life which had only been achieved towards the
end of the middle STAGE of barbarism were broken up by the repeated
shifting and changing of residence under the pressure of trade, alteration
of occupation and changes in the ownership of the land.

16) Rather, it is a product of society at a particular STAGE of
development; it is the admission that this society has involved itself in
insoluble self-contradiction and is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms
which it is powerless to exorcise.

17) On the contrary, it marks a low STAGE in the development of the state.

18) At a definite STAGE of economic development, which necessarily involved
the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity because
of this cleavage.

19) We are now rapidly approaching a STAGE in the development of production
at which the existence of these classes has not only ceased to be a
necessity, but becomes a positive hindrance to production.

20) Civilization is, therefore, according to the above analysis, the STAGE
of development in society at which the division of labor, the exchange
between individuals arising from it, and the commodity production which
combines them both, come to their full growth and revolutionizes the whole
of previous society.

21) At all earlier STAGES of society production was essentially collective,
just as consumption proceeded by direct distribution of the products within
larger or smaller communistic communities.

22) These economic laws of commodity production are modified with the
various STAGES of this form of production; but in general the whole period
of civilization is dominated by them.

23) We saw above how at a fairly early STAGE in the development of
production, human labor-power obtains the capacity of producing a
considerably greater product than is required for the maintenance of the
producers, and how this STAGE of development was in the main the same as
that in which division of labor and exchange between individuals arise.

24) The STAGE of commodity production with which civilization begins is
distinguished economically by the introduction of (1) metal money, and with
it money capital, interest and usury; (2) merchants, as the class of
intermediaries between the producers; (3) private ownership of land, and
the mortgage system; (4) slave labor as the dominant form of production. 

25) Therefore the more civilization advances, the more it is compelled to
cover the evils it necessarily creates with the cloak of love and charity,
to palliate them or to deny them -- in short, to introduce a conventional
hypocrisy which was unknown to earlier forms of society and even to the
first STAGES of civilization, and which culminates in the pronouncement:
the exploitation of the oppressed class is carried on by the exploiting
class simply and solely in the interests of the exploited class itself; and
if the exploited class cannot see it and even grows rebellious, that is the
basest ingratitude to its benefactors, the exploiters.

Louis Proyect



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