By Alan Woods
Have you read Part I?
What is barbarism?
The word "barbarism" is used in different contexts for different things. It can even have the force of a simple insult, when we refer to the barbaric behaviour of certain over-enthusiastic football fans. To the ancient Greeks (who first coined the word) it meant simply "one who does not speak the language" (i.e. Greek). But to Marxists, it usually signifies the stage between primitive communism and early class society, when classes begin to form and with them the state. Barbarism is a transitional phase, in which the old commune is already in a state of decay and in which classes and the state are in the process of formation.
Like all other human societies (including savagery, the phase of hunter-gathering societies based on primitive communism, which produced the marvellous cave art of France and northern Spain), the barbarians certainly had a culture, and were capable of producing very fine and sophisticated objects of art. Their techniques of warfare show that they were also capable of extraordinary feats of organisation, and this was shown when they defeated the Roman legions. The Romans even began to copy some of the barbarians' military tactics, and introduced the short bow, perfected by the Huns and other tribes for shooting from horseback.
The period of barbarism represents a very large slice of human history, and is divided into several more or less distinct periods. In general, it is characterised by the transition from the hunter-gathering mode of production to pastoralism and agriculture, that is, from Palaeolithic savagery, passing through Neolithic barbarism to the higher barbarism of the Bronze Age, which stands at the threshold of civilization. The decisive turning-point was what Gordon Childe called the Neolithic revolution, which represented a great leap forward in the development of human productive capacity, and therefore of culture. This is what Childe has to say:
"Our debt to preliterate barbarism is heavy. Every single cultivated food plant of any importance has been discovered by some nameless barbarian society." (G. Childe, What Happened in History, p. 64)
Here is the embryo out of which grew the towns and cities, writing, industry and everything else that laid the basis for which we call civilization. The roots of civilization are to be found precisely in barbarism, and still more so, in slavery. The development of barbarism ends up in slavery or else in what Marx called the Asiatic mode of production.
It would be incorrect to deny the contribution of barbarian peoples to human development. They played a role, and a vital one, at a certain stage. They possessed a culture, and an advanced one for the time in which they lived. But history does not stand still. The further development of the productive forces led to new socio-economic forms that stood on a qualitatively higher level. Our modern civilization (such as it is) derives from the colossal conquests of Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, and even more, from Greece and Rome.
While not denying the existence of barbarian culture, Marxists have no hesitation in affirming that the latter was historically superseded by the cultures of Egypt, Greece and Rome that grew out of barbarism, overtook and replaced it. To deny this fact would be to fly in the face of the facts.
The role of slavery
If we look at the entire process of human history and prehistory, the first thing that strikes us is the extraordinary slowness with which our species developed. The gradual evolution of human or humanoid creatures away from the condition of animals and towards a genuinely human condition took place over millions of years. For the first period that we call savagery, characterised by an extremely low development of the means of production, the production of stone tools, and a hunter-gatherer mode of existence, the line of development remains virtually flat for a very long period. It begins to accelerate precisely in the period known as barbarism (particularly with the Neolithic revolution) when the first stable communities became towns (such as Jericho, which dates from about 7,000 BC).
However, the really explosive growth occurs with Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley (and also China), Persia, Greece and Rome. In other words, the development of class society coincides with a massive upturn in the productive forces, and as a result, of human culture, which reached unprecedented heights. This is not the place to mention all the discoveries made by, say the Greeks and Romans. There is a celebrated scene in the Monty Python film The Life of Brian, where a rather over-enthusiastic "freedom fighter" asks the rhetorical question: "What have the Romans ever done for us?" To his great annoyance, he got a long list of answers. We should not make the same mistake as this fictional character!
But, it may be objected, Greece and Rome stood on the basis of slavery, which is an abhorrent and inhuman institution. The marvellous achievements of ancient Athens were all predicated on slavery. Its democracy - probably the most advanced in the world to date - was the democracy of a minority of free citizens. The majority - the slaves - had no rights at all. I recently received a letter, which compares slave society unfavourably to barbarism. I reproduce an extract:
"Actually primitive societies are the least barbaric in world history. For instance, their wars were/are mostly ritual with almost no victims. The barbarism of nazism and the Balkan wars is a typical feature of capitalism, just like feudalism or slave society had their typical barbaric features. The most barbarous facts in history are all in one way or another consequences of class society."
The above lines pose the question of war not in a materialist but in a moralistic sense. War has always been barbaric. It is about killing people in the most efficient manner. One can readily agree that the wars of primitive societies killed a lot fewer people than modern wars. That is to a great extent because the development of science and technique have led to a perfection of human productivity, not only in industry and agriculture, but also on the battlefield. Engels explains in Anti-Dühring how the history of warfare can only be understood in terms of the development of the means of production. The Romans were a lot more efficient at killing people than the barbarians (at least in the period of ascent of Roman power), and we are incomparably more efficient than the Romans in this sphere, and many others besides.
Marxists cannot look at history from the point of view of morality. Apart from anything else, there is no such thing as a supra-historical morality. Every society has its own morality, religion, culture, etc, which correspond to a given level of development, and, at least in the period we call civilization, also to the interests of a particular class. Whether a particular war was good, bad or indifferent cannot be ascertained from the point of view of the number of victims, and much less from an abstract moral standpoint. We may strongly disapprove of wars in general, but one thing cannot be denied: throughout the whole course of human history, all serious questions have ultimately been settled in this way. That goes both for the conflicts between nations (wars) and also the conflicts between classes (revolutions).
Nor can our attitude towards a particular type of society and its culture be determined by moralistic considerations. From the standpoint of historical materialism it is a matter of complete indifference that some barbarians (including, it seems, my own ancestors, the ancient Celts) were head-hunters who burned people alive inside large wicker statues to celebrate midsummer's day. That is no more reason to condemn them than the fact that they also produced fine jewellery and declaimed poetry can be used to praise them. What determines whether a given socio-economic formation is historically progressive or not is first and foremost its ability to develop the productive forces - the real material basis upon which all human culture arises and develops.
The reason why human development was so painfully slow for such a long period of time was precisely the very low level of development of the productive forces. The real development begins already in the phase of barbarism, as explained above. This was a progressive development in its day, but was overtaken, negated and superseded by a higher form that was slavery. Old Hegel, that wonderfully profound thinker, writes: "It was not so much from slavery as through slavery that humanity was emancipated." (Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 407)
The Romans utilised brute force to subjugate other peoples, sold entire cities into slavery, slaughtered thousands of prisoners of war for amusement in the public circus, and introduced such refined methods of execution as crucifixion. Yes, all that is perfectly true. And yet, when we come to consider where all our modern civilization, our culture, our literature, our architecture, our medicine, our science, our philosophy, even in many cases our language, comes from, the answer is - from Greece and Rome.
It is not a difficult task to read out a long list of the crimes of the Romans (or the feudal lords or the modern day capitalists). It is even possible to compare them unfavourably, at least in some respects, to the barbarian tribes against which they were more or less constantly at war. This is not new. In fact, you can read numerous passages in the writings of the Roman historian Tacitus who does precisely that. But it does not carry us a single step forward in our understanding of history. Only by consistently applying the method of historical materialism is this possible.
The rise and fall of Rome
Although the labour of the individual slave was not very productive (slaves must be compelled to work), the aggregate of large numbers of slaves, as in the mines and latifundia (large scale agricultural units) in Rome in the last period of the Republic and the Empire, produced a considerable surplus. At the height of the Empire, slaves were plentiful and cheap and the wars of Rome were basically slave hunts on a massive scale. But at a certain stage this system reached its limits and then entered into a lengthy period of decline.
The beginnings of a crisis in Rome can already be observed in the latter period of the Republic, a period characterised by acute social and political upheavals and class war. From the earliest beginnings there was a violent struggle between rich and poor in Rome. There are detailed accounts in the writings of Livy and others of the struggles between Plebeians and Patricians, which ended in an uneasy compromise. At a later period, when Rome had already made herself mistress of the Mediterranean by the defeat of her most powerful rival Carthage, we saw what was in effect a struggle for the division of the spoils.
Tiberius Gracchus demanded that the wealth of Rome be divided up among its free citizens. His aim was to make Italy a republic of small farmers and not slaves, but he was defeated by the nobles and slave-holders. This was a disaster for Rome in the long run. The ruined peasantry - the backbone of the Republic and its army - drifted to Rome where they constituted a lumpen-proletariat, a non-productive class, living off dole from the state. Although resentful of the rich, they nevertheless shared a common interest in the exploitation of the slaves - the only really productive class in the period of the Republic and the Empire.
The great slave rising under Spartacus was a glorious episode in the history of antiquity. The echoes of this titanic uprising reverberates down the centuries and is still a source of inspiration. The spectacle of these most downtrodden people rising up with arms in hand and inflicting defeat after defeat on the armies of the world's greatest power is one of the most incredible events in history. Had they succeeded in overthrowing the Roman state, the course of history would have been significantly altered.
Of course, it is not possible to say exactly what the outcome would have been. Undoubtedly the slaves would have been freed. Given the level of development of the productive forces, the general tendency could only have been in the direction of some kind of feudalism. But at least humanity would have been spared the horrors of the Dark Ages, and it is likely that economic and cultural development would have proceeded more quickly.
The basic reason why Spartacus failed in the end was the fact that the slaves did not link up with the proletariat in the towns. So long as the latter continued to support the state, the victory of the slaves was impossible. But the Roman proletariat, unlike the modern proletariat, was not a productive but a purely parasitical class, living off the labour of the slaves and dependent on their masters. The failure of the Roman revolution is rooted in this fact.
Marx and Engels point out that the class struggle eventually ends either in the total victory of one of the classes, or else in the common ruin of the contending classes. The fate of Roman society is the clearest example of the latter case. The defeat of the slaves led straight to the ruin of the Roman state. In the absence of a free peasantry, the state was obliged to rely on a mercenary army to fight its wars. The deadlock in the class struggle produced a situation similar to the more modern phenomenon of Bonapartism. The Roman equivalent is what we call Caesarism.
The Roman legionnaire was no longer loyal to the Republic but to his commander - the man who guaranteed his pay, his loot and a plot of land when he retired. The last period of the Republic is characterised by an intensification of the struggle between the classes, in which neither side is able to win a decisive victory. As a result, the state (which Lenin described as "armed bodies of men") began to acquire increasing independence, to raise itself above society and to appear as the final arbiter in the continuing power struggles in Rome.
A whole series of military adventurers appears: Marius, Crassus, Pompey, and lastly Julius Caesar, a general of brilliance, a clever politician and a shrewd businessman, who in effect put an end to the Republic whilst paying lip-service to it. His prestige boosted by his military triumphs in Gaul, Spain and Britain, he began to concentrate all power in his hands. Although he was assassinated by a conservative faction which wished to preserve the Republic, the old regime was doomed.
In his play Julius Caesar, Shakespeare says of Brutus: "This was the noblest Roman of them all." Certainly, Brutus and the other conspirators who killed Caesar did not lack personal courage, and their motives may or not have been noble. But they were hopeless utopians. The republic that they tried to defend had been a rotten corpse for a long time. After Brutus and the others were defeated by the triumvirate, the Republic was formally recognised, and this pretence was kept up by the first Emperor, Augustus. The very title "Emperor" (imperator in Latin) is a military title, invented to avoid the title of king that was so offensive to republican ears. But a king he was, in all but name.
The forms of the old Republic survived for a long time after that. But they were just that - hollow forms with no real content, an empty husk that in the end could be blown away by the wind. The Senate was devoid of all real power and authority. Julius Caesar had shocked respectable public opinion by making a Gaul a member of the senate. Caligula considerably improved upon this by making his horse a senator. Nobody saw anything wrong with this, or if they did they kept their mouths firmly shut.
The emperors continued to "consult" the senate, and even contrived not to laugh out loud when so doing. In the last period of the Empire, when, as a result of the decline of production, corruption and looting, the finances were in a lamentable state, wealthy Romans were regularly "promoted" to the rank of senator in order to extract extra taxes from them. One such reluctant legislator was said by some Roman humorist to have been "banished into the senate".
It often happens in history that outworn institutions can survive long after their reason to exist has disappeared. They drag out a miserable existence like a decrepit old man who clings onto life, until they are swept away by a revolution. The decline of the Roman empire lasted for nearly four centuries. This was not an uninterrupted process. There were periods of recovery and even brilliance, but the general line was downwards.
In periods like this, there is a general sense of malaise. The predominant mood is one of scepticism, lack of faith and pessimism in the future. The old traditions, morality and religion - things that act as a powerful cement holding society together - lose their credibility. In place of the old religion, people seek out new gods. In its period of decline, Rome was inundated with a plague of religious sects from the east. Christianity was only one of these, and although ultimately successful, had to contend with numerous rivals, such as the cult of Mithras.
When people feel that the world in which they live is tottering, that they have lost all control over their existence, that their lives and destinies are determined by unseen forces, then mystical and irrational tendencies get the upper hand. People believe that the end of the world is nigh. The early Christians believed this fervently, but many others suspected it. In point of fact what was coming to an end was not the world but only a particular form of society - slave society. The success of Christianity was rooted in the fact that it connected with this general mood. The world was evil and sinful. It was necessary to turn one's back on the world and all its works and look forward to another life after death.
In fact, these ideas were already foreshadowed by philosophical tendencies in Rome. When men and women lose all hope in existing society, they have two options: either to try to arrive at a rational understanding of what is happening in order to fight to change society, or else to turn their back on society altogether. In the period of decline, Roman philosophy was dominated by subjectivism - stoicism and scepticism. Proceeding from a different angle, Epicurus taught people to seek happiness and learn to live without fear. It is a sublime philosophy, but in the given context, could only appeal to the more intelligent sections of the privileged classes. Finally, the Neo-Platonist philosophy of Plotinus verges on overt mysticism and superstition, eventually providing a philosophical justification for Christianity.
By the time the barbarians invaded, the whole structure was on the verge of collapse, not only economically, but morally and spiritually. No wonder the barbarians were welcomed as liberators by the slaves and poorer sections of society. They merely completed a job that had been well prepared in advance. The barbarian attacks were an historical accident that served to express an historical necessity.
Why the barbarians triumphed
How was it possible for a highly developed culture to be so easily overcome by a more backward and primitive one? The seeds of Rome's destruction were sown long before the barbarian invasions. The basic contradiction of the slave economy is that it was, paradoxically, based on a low productivity of labour. Slave labour is only productive when it is employed on massive scale. The prior condition for this is an ample supply of slaves at a low cost. Since slaves breed very slowly in captivity, the only way a sufficient supply of slaves can be guaranteed is through continuous warfare. Once the Empire had reached the limits of its expansion under Hadrian, this became increasingly difficult.
Once the Empire reached its limits and the contradictions inherent in slavery began to assert themselves, Rome entered into a long period of decline that lasted more than four hundred years, until it was eventually overrun by the barbarians. The mass migrations that brought about the collapse of the Empire were a common phenomenon among nomadic pastoral peoples in antiquity and occurred for a variety of reasons - pressure on pasture land as a result of population growth, climate changes, etc.
In this case, the more settled peoples of the western steppes and eastern Europe were driven from their lands by pressure from more backward nomadic tribes living to the east, the Hsiung-nu, better known to us as the Huns. Did these barbarians possess a culture? Yes, they possessed a kind of culture, as every people from the dawn of history had a culture. The Huns had no knowledge of agriculture, but their horde was a formidable fighting machine. Their cavalry had no equal in the world at that time. It was said of them that their country was the back of a horse.
However, unfortunately for Europe, the Huns in the fourth century came up against a more advanced culture, a civilization that knew the art of building, lived in towns and cities, and possessed a disciplined army - China. The fighting prowess of these dreaded warriors from the Mongolian steppes was no match for the civilized Chinese, who built the Great Wall - a formidable engineering feat - to keep them out.
Defeated by the Chinese, the Huns turned westwards, leaving behind them a trail of appalling destruction and devastation. Passing through what is now Russia, they clashed with the Goths in present-day Romania in 355 AD. Although the Gothic tribes stood on a higher level of development than the Huns, they were cut to pieces and forced to flee westwards. The survivors - some 80,000 desperate men, women and children on primitive wagons - came up against the frontiers of the Roman Empire at a time when the decline of slave society had reached a point where its capacity to defend itself was severely weakened. The Visigoths (western Goths), who stood on a lower level of development than the Romans, nevertheless defeated them. The Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus described this clash of two alien worlds as "the most disastrous Roman defeat since Cannae." (Ammianus, xxxi, 13)
With remarkable swiftness most of the towns were laid waste and abandoned. It is true that this process did not start with the barbarians. The decay of the slave economy, the monstrously oppressive nature of the Empire with its bloated bureaucracy and predatory tax farmers, was already undermining the whole system. There was a steady drift to the countryside where the basis was already being laid for the development of a different mode of production - feudalism. The barbarians merely delivered the coup de grâce to a rotten and moribund system. The whole edifice was tottering, and they merely gave it a last and violent push.
The seemingly impregnable Roman line along the Danube and Rhine buckled and collapsed. At a certain stage different barbarian tribes, including the Huns, converged in a united onslaught against Rome. The Gothic chieftain Alaric (who, incidentally was an Arian Christian and a former Roman mercenary) led 40,000 Goths, Huns and freed slaves across the Julian Alps and eight years later sacked Rome itself. Although Alaric, who seems to have been a relatively enlightened person, tried to spare the citizens of Rome, he could not control the Huns and freed slaves, who gave themselves up to murder, plunder and rape. Priceless pieces of sculpture were destroyed and works of art were melted down for their precious metals. This was only the beginning. In the following centuries, successive waves of barbarians swept out of the east: Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Alans, Lombards, Suevi, Alemanni, Burgundians, Franks, Thuringians, Frisians, Heruli, Gepidae, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Huns and Magyars, pushed their way into Europe. The all-powerful and eternal Empire was reduced to ashes.
Was civilization thrown back?
Is it correct to say that the overthrow of the Roman Empire by the barbarians threw human civilization back? Despite the recent noisy campaign by the "Friends of Barbarism Society", there can be no doubt about this, and it can easily be demonstrated with facts and figures. The immediate effect of the barbarian onslaught was to wipe out civilization and throw society and human thought back for a thousand years.
The productive forces suffered a violent interruption. The cities were destroyed or abandoned as people fled to the land in search of food. As even our old friend Rudgley is forced to admit: "The only architectural remains left by the Huns are the ashes of the cities that they burned." And not just the Huns. The first act of the Goths was to burn the city of Mainz to the ground. Why did they do this? Why did they not simply occupy it? The answer is related to the backward stage of economic development of the invaders. They were an agricultural people and knew nothing of towns and cities. The barbarians in general were hostile to the towns and their inhabitants (a psychology that is quite common among peasants in all periods).
St. Jerome describes the results of this devastation when he writes: "That in those desert countries nothing was left except the sky and the earth; that after the destruction of the cities and the extirpation of the human race, the land was overgrown with thick forests and inextricable brambles; and that universal desolation, announced by the prophet Zephaniah, was accomplished in the scarcity of the beasts, the birds and even of the fish." (Quoted in Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 3, p. 49)
These lines were written 20 years after the death of Valens the emperor, when the barbarian invasions started. They describe the state of affairs in Jerome's native province, Pannonia (present-day Hungary) where successive waves of invaders caused death and destruction on an unimaginable scale. In the end, Pannonia was completely depopulated and later occupied by the Huns and finally the present day population of Magyars. This process of devastation, rape and pillage was to continue for centuries, leaving behind a terrible heritage of backwardness - in fact, of barbarism - which we call the Dark Ages. Let us give just one quote:
"The Dark Ages were stark in every dimension. Famines and plagues, culminating in the Black Death and its recurring pandemics, repeatedly thinned the population. Rickets affected the survivors. Extraordinary climatic changes brought storms and floods, which turned into major disasters because the empire's drainage system, like most of the imperial infrastructure, was no longer functioning. It says much about the Middle Ages that in the year 1500, after a thousand years of neglect, the roads built by the Romans were still the best on the continent. Most of the others were in such a state of disrepair that they were unusable; so were all European harbours until the eighteenth century, when commerce again began to stir. Among the lost arts was bricklaying; in all of Germany, England, Holland, and Scandinavia, virtually no stone buildings, except cathedrals, were raised for ten centuries. The serfs' basic agricultural tools were picks, forks, rakes, scythes, and balanced sickles. Because there was very little iron, there were no wheeled ploughshares with moldboards. The lack of ploughs was not a major problem in the south, where farmers could pulverise the light Mediterranean soils, but the heavier earth in northern Europe had to be sliced, moved and turned by hand. Although horses and oxen were available, they were of limited use. The horse collar, harness, and stirrup did not exist until about 900 AD. Therefore tandem hitching was impossible. Peasants laboured harder, sweated more, and collapsed from exhaustion more often than their animals." (William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire, pp. 5-6)
The rise of the feudal system following the collapse of Rome was accompanied by a long period of cultural stagnation in all Europe to the west of the Pyrenees. With the exception of two inventions: the water wheel and windmills, there were no real inventions for about over a 1000 years. In other words, there was a complete eclipse of culture. This was a result of the collapse of the productive forces, upon which culture ultimately depends. Failure to understand this makes a scientific understanding of history completely impossible.
Human thought, art, science and culture was reduced to the most primitive level, and only experienced a relative recovery when the ideas of the Greeks and Romans were introduced into medieval Europe - by the Arabs. True, the knot of history was retied again in the period we call the Renaissance. The slow recovery of trade led to the rise of the bourgeoisie and a revival of the towns, notably in Flanders, Holland and northern Italy. But it is an actual fact that civilization was thrown back for a thousand years. That is what we mean by a descending line in history. And let nobody imagine that such a thing cannot recur.
Socialism or barbarism
The whole of human history consists precisely in the struggle of humankind to raise itself above the animal level. This long struggle began seven million years ago, when our remote humanoid ancestors first stood upright and were able to free their hands for manual labour. The production of the first stone scrapers and hand axes was the beginning of a process whereby men and women made themselves human through labour. Ever since then, successive phases of social development have arisen on the basis of changes in the development of the productive force of labour - that is to say, of our power over nature.
For most of human history, this process has been painfully slow, as the Economist remarked on the eve of the new millennium:
"For nearly all of human history, economic advance has been so slow as to be imperceptible within the span of a lifetime. For century after century, the annual rate of economic growth was, to one place of decimals, zero. When growth did happen it was so slow as to be invisible to contemporaries - and even in retrospect it appears not as rising living standards (which is what growth means today), merely as a gentle rise in population. Down the millennia, progress, for all but a tiny elite, amounted to this: it slowly became possible for more people to live, at the meanest level of subsistence." (The Economist, December 31, 1999)
The relation between the development of human culture and the productive forces was already clear to that great genius of antiquity, Aristotle, who explained in his book The Metaphysics that "man begins to philosophise when the means of life are provided," and added that the reason why astronomy and mathematics were discovered in Egypt is that the priest caste did not have to work. This is a purely materialist understanding of history. It is the complete answer to all the nonsense of the utopians who imagine that life would be splendid if only we could "go back to nature" - that is, go back to an animal level of existence.
The possibility of real socialism depends on the development of the means of production to a level far in excess of even the most developed capitalist societies, like the USA, Germany or Japan. This was explained by Marx even before he wrote the Communist Manifesto. In the German Ideology he wrote that "where want is generalised all the old crap revives." And by "all the old crap" he meant class oppression, inequality and exploitation. The reason why the October Revolution degenerated into Stalinism was that it remained isolated in a backward country where the material conditions for building socialism were absent.
Despite the fact that capitalism is the most exploitative and oppressive system that has ever existed; despite the fact that, in Marx's words, "Capital came onto the stage of history dripping blood from every pore," it nevertheless represented a colossal leap forward in the development of the productive forces - and therefore of our power over nature. The development of industry, agriculture, science and technology has transformed the planet and laid the basis for a complete revolution that for the first time will make us free human beings.
We have emerged from savagery, barbarism, slavery and feudalism, and each of these stages represented a definite stage in the development of the productive forces and culture. The bud disappears when the flower blossoms and we may consider that as a negation, one thing contradicting the other. But in point of fact, these are necessary stages, and must be taken in their unity. It is absurd to deny the historical role of barbarism, or any other stage of human development. But history moves on.
Every phase of human development has its roots in all previous development. This is true both of human evolution and social development. We have evolved from lower species and are genetically related to even the most primitive life forms, as the human genome has conclusively proved. We are separated from our nearest living relatives the chimpanzees by a genetic difference of less than two percent. But that very small percentage represents a tremendous qualitative leap.
In the same way, the development of capitalism has now laid the basis for a new and qualitatively higher (yes, higher) stage of human development, which we call socialism. The present crisis on a world scale is nothing but a reflection of the fact that the development of the productive forces is coming into conflict with the straitjacket of private ownership and the nation state. Capitalism has long ago ceased to play any progressive role, and has become a monstrous obstacle to further development. This obstacle bust be removed if humanity is to go forward. And if it is not removed in time, a terrible threat hangs over the heads of the human race.
The embryo of a new society is already maturing within the womb of the old. The elements of a workers' democracy already exist in the form of the workers' organisations, the shop stewards committees, the trade unions, the co-operatives etc. In the period that opens up, there will be a life and death struggle - a struggle of those elements of the new society to be born, and an equally fierce resistance on the part of the old order to prevent this from happening.
At a certain stage this conflict - which can already be seen in outline in the general strikes in Europe, the revolutionary movements in Argentina and other Latin American countries, and the revolt of the youth everywhere - will reach a critical point. No ruling class in history has ever given up its power and privileges without a ferocious struggle. The crisis of capitalism represents not just an economic crisis that threatens the jobs and living standards of millions of people throughout the world. It also threatens the very basis of a civilised existence - insofar as this exists. It threatens to throw humankind back on all fronts. If the proletariat - the only genuinely revolutionary class - does not succeed in overthrowing the rule of the banks and monopolies, the stage will be set for a collapse of culture and even a return to barbarism.
In fact, for most people in the West (and not only in the West) the most obvious and painful manifestations of the crisis of capitalism are not economic but those phenomena that affect their personal lives at the most sensitive and emotional points: the breakdown of the family, the epidemic of crime and violence, the collapse of the old values and morality with nothing to put in their place, the constant outbreak of wars - all of this gives rise to a sense of instability, a lack of faith in the present or the future. These are the symptoms of the impasse of capitalism, which in the last analysis (but only in the last analysis) is a result of the revolt of the productive forces against the straitjacket of private property and the nation state.
It was Marx who pointed out that there were two possibilities before the human race: socialism or barbarism. The formal democracy, which the workers of Europe and the USA regard as something normal is actually a very fragile structure that will not survive an open showdown between the classes. The "cultured" bourgeoisie will not hesitate to move in the direction of dictatorship in the future. And beneath the thin layer of culture and modern civilization, there are forces that resemble barbarism at its worst. The recent events in the Balkans are a stark reminder of this. Civilized norms can easily break down and the demons of a long-forgotten past can overwhelm even the most civilized nation. Yes, indeed, history knows a descending line as well as an ascending one!
The question is therefore posed in the starkest terms: in the coming period, either the working class will take into its hands the running of society, replacing the decrepit capitalist system with a new social order based on the harmonious and rational planning of the productive forces and the conscious control of men and women over their own lives and destinies, or else we will be faced with a most frightful spectacle of social, economic and cultural collapse.
For thousands of years culture has been the monopoly of a privileged minority, while the great majority of humanity was excluded from knowledge, science, art and government. Even now, this remains the case. Despite all our pretensions we are not really civilized. Our world does not merit the name. It is a barbaric world, inhabited by people who have yet to overcome a barbarous past. Life remains a harsh and unrelenting struggle to exist for the great majority of the planet, not only in the underdeveloped world but in the developed capitalist countries.
However, historical materialism does not incline us to draw pessimistic conclusions, but on the contrary. The general tendency of human history has been in the direction of ever greater development of our productive and cultural potential. The great achievements of the last hundred years have for the first time created a situation where all the problems facing humankind can easily be solved. The potential for a classless society already exists on a world scale. What is necessary is to bring about a rational and harmonious planning of the productive forces in order that this immense, practically infinite, potential can be realised.
On the basis of a real revolution in production, it would be possible to achieve such a level of abundance that men and women would no longer have to worry about their everyday necessities. The humiliating concerns and fears that fill every thinking hour of men and women now will disappear. For the first time, free human beings will be masters of their destinies. For the first time they will be really human. Only then will the real history of the human race begin.
London,
July 17, 2002
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