/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

bump? is that ok?

bro what are you talking about, there are tons of marxist studies on pre-capitalist societies

>>2795020

then link them im new to leftism somewhat at least…. jesus

>>2795022
sure, engels' work is maybe a bit dated but at least gets you the introductions on the subject
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm

>>2795029


Thanks i just found some stuff on libcom about class struggle in ancient rome too, pretty cool.

Plato in Statesman gives his designation of the three forms of government: monarchy (rule of the one), oligarchy (rule of the few) and democracy (rule of the many). He says that for each, there is good and bad version, later explored by Aristotle in his Politics. Plato in Republic discusses the four classes of society: labourers, merchants, warriors/rulers and intellectuals. This is identical to the Hindu caste system, such as what is written in Manusmirti (Laws of Manu). Aristotle later writes that this system began in Egypt, and of course, it resembles a triangle, where there are a few on top and most on the bottom, the same as today. Plato also discusses class struggle in the body politic however, which transitions the form of government from one into another. Polybius later calls this "Anacyclosis", or the progression of the cycle of power in the state, which clearly depends upon two factors: (i) division of labour and (ii) property rights. Thus, a monarchy places property in the king, while a democracy places property in the people, yet the distribution of property also depends upon one's income, which is determined by the division of labour (e.g. skilled vs unskilled labour).

So then, the ancients had an extremely sophisticated notion of society. What differs from the modern and premodern however, is the idea of an end to the cycle of history by an eschatological utopia. Of course, this has precedence in Christ (e.g. a new heaven on a new earth), but this also invokes astrology, a cyclical concept. We see the first utopian literature in Thomas More's "Utopia" (1513) for example. Later writings from Gerald Winstanley (1653) give visions of a heaven on earth, continuous in Thomas Jefferson (1776) who idealises an agrarian utopia in "The New World". Now, this is reminiscent of ancient myths of Eden or the Golden Age, butit is now sought to be consciously realised. What disrupts this is industry, which increasingly stratifies property relations between capitalists and wage workers. Agrarianism is dead and a new industrial imagination emerges. It is filled with horrors, but also hopes, since the ideal is an increase in the trend of centralisation, yet this does not quite come to pass. By the late 19th and early 20th century, there is the awareness of an expanding ruling class, comprised not simply of industrialists, but rentiers if all sorts. Power is also shared by added protections in the police and military. The caste system has returned, and history begins its cycle once more!

I am inherently pessimistic of civilisation, since it does seem to conform to a trend of an absolute pattern of domination. Look at this poster created in 1911. It is basically what Plato wrote about around 2,400 years ago…

>So how can people avoid that being the case beyond capitalism?
because the revolutionary class of capitalism, the proletariat, has no ownership over the means of production and class differences emerge from different relations to the MoP. Take these questions to QTDDTOT please.

Feudal MoP = John Haldon's "Tributary Mode of Production"
Slave MoP = de Ste. Croix's "Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World"

>>2795872
>class differences emerge from different relations to the MoP
But that's not true; classes are defined by divisions of labour which distribute property unevenly. A class society is plural, not simply dual.

>>2795882
>classes are defined by divisions of labour which distribute property unevenly
Sure, I should have added different relations to the distribution of surplus. Regardless.
>A class society is plural, not simply dual.
Yes, obviously the revolutionary class of the feudal MoP era, the landed gentry / bourgeoisie, was not equal to the free peasantry was not equal to the villeins.
When I said
>revolutionary class of capitalism, the proletariat, has no ownership over the means of production
That's obviously in contradiction to the slaves or the proletarii of the slave MoP not being the revolutionary class.

>>2794562
Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism studies class before capitalism. He argues that medieval european society was racialised in the sense that aristocrats and peasants were seen as different 'breeds' of people.


You might also want to check out the work of BR Ambhedkar on caste in India, specifically the historical origins.

>>2795900
>the revolutionary class of the feudal MoP era, the landed gentry / bourgeoisie
There are not very comparable. Gentry were nobles, while the burghers were commoners. Their revolutionary capacities are also misaligned. We see the sharing of powers following Magna Carta, leading to parliament, but this does not advance feudalism, except in perhaps increasing exploitation by an increase in rulers. Only by the late 15th century do we see the rise of agricultural capital, which nominally retains the same relation of lord to serf.
>not equal to the free peasantry
Well, while free peasantry and bourgeoisie were both commoners, the house of commons was still exclusive to wealth and status, yet still massively pertaining to bourgeois interests, which rebelled against the house of lords, ascending around the late 14th century in England. Marx writes that capitalism begins as an agricultural revolution, of privatising land from the Tudor period onwards (i.e. in the gentry), while the Yeoman farmer was still as yet a middle class ideal (i.e. the peasant), repeated in the fantasies of Thomas Jefferson (the rhetoric of the English revolutionaries largely concerned claims to land, since Charles had already enclosed much of the commons - the Diggers' movement thus placed the right to land in the labour which cultivates it, the same as Locke later on). Only by the rise of industrial power from the late 17th century onwards, does the bourgeoisie (read: urban middle class) come to colonise the socio-economic landscape. The industrial revolution was an urban movement, which contrasted from the earlier agricultural capital, and thus, value shifted from country to town, such as we see politically in the US Civil War, between north and south. Marx sees that the post-napoleonic period (1820-) is when the bourgeoisie became conservative in their new-found power, being substituted for the proletariat (with precedence in the Chartists, 1832-48). So, I would see that the bourgeoisie is really the revolutionary force of history by universalising its subject and object, which is why we still use these modern theories today.
>That's obviously in contradiction to the slaves or the proletarii of the slave MoP not being the revolutionary class.
Of course, this is entirely contentious, and I hardly believe in proletarian revolution; instead seeing intellectuals as the real driving force behind social change (e.g. revolutionary theory leading to revolutionary action). Even the Diggers had Winstanley's writings, and the Chartists had a manifesto. The pen is mightier than the sword.

>>2795877
I never understood why Samir Amin, Eric Wolf, and John Haldon lumped the Ancient and Feudal modes of production together into the same Tributary mode of production (the description they give of the Tributary mode of production seems to be identical to the Feudal mode of production, which leads me to believe that it is just a name change to make it sound less Eurocentric), as my understanding of Historical Materialism always was that Feudal societies (ie. Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Byzantine Empire, Arab Caliphates, Ottoman Empire, Mughal India, Imperial China, etc.) had an oppressed class of peasants/serfs that were coerced by a ruling class of aristocrats/nobles to give a portion of their produce to them as surplus, while in the previous Ancient mode of production (ie. Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Babylon, Assyria, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Persia, Indus Valley, Mauryan and Gupta India, Shang dynasty, Aztecs, Olmecs, Zapotecs, Incas, etc.) an oppressed class of slaves is owned as property by a ruling class of citizens who exploit them as much as they want, which seems quite different, 🤔?

Would any Comrade like to answer my question at >>2796361 , I am genuinely confused about this, 🤔?

>>2796361
>John Haldon lumped the Ancient and Feudal modes of production together into the same Tributary mode of production
Haldon acknowledges a slave MoP, he just says that most of the common instances of the slave MoP existing are when it co-exists with an emerging Tributary MoP, thus he says ancient Greece also had features of tributary MoP.
>the description they give of the Tributary mode of production seems to be identical to the Feudal mode of production, which leads me to believe that it is just a name change to make it sound less Eurocentric
For Amin, the Ancient MoP is one category of the Tributary MoP. He made his Tributary MoP category with an overly large net to make sure the examples of the Asiatic MoP would also be included, and because a lot of societies with "Asiatic MoP" had quite high levels of slavery in addition to the dominance of dependent peasant tenants paying rent in services or in kind, he struggled to find a dividing line between the two. Haldon would argue that slavery in those cases may well be present but that there's a difference in if its the main process of producing / extracting surplus.
For Haldon, the Tributary MoP is just another way to say "Feudal MoP", since bourgeois historians have spent the past 150 years using "feudal MoP" to debunk Marxism by claiming that Marx thought that the western-European Feudal legal system was somehow present in the Ottoman Empire, Mughal India, etc. when obviously they had different legal structures even if they had the same MoP.
"Feudalism" is the name for a particular legal system that existed in Western Europe, and "Feudal MoP" just means "that MoP that was present in western Europe while the Feudal legal system was dominant there". To make it easier for these bourgeois historians to understand, Haldon just uses "Tributary MoP" instead.

marxists must come up with a trans-historical metric of economic exploitation in order to prove that new classes will never arise in any future society

>>2795029
This book is awful and full of misinformation

Manlets WILL be the underclass.

>>2794562
subsistence, surplus, and conditional access to surplus are all dynamics that exist in the animal kingdom. hierarchy predates humanity. class is just socially constructed hierarchy around restricting access to surplus. As soon as an animal is capable of producing more than it needs to survive, it has a extra AKA "surplus". This surplus becomes fought over at the level of the community. It can be redistributed, hoarded, or have access to it be made conditional on behaviors like loyalty (obey me and I'll give you some of my stuff) and reproduction (have sex with me and I'll give you some of my stuff). In a society that is industrial, surplus is so large that scarcity becomes largely artificial. Society produces more than enough for everyone to live, including the old, the disabled, the babies, but access to the surplus is made conditional on offering yourself up for exploitation. Sometimes so much is produced that prices crash. Rather than redistribute the surplus, it is destroyed to stabilize the prices. This shows that in any society that produces more than it needs to survive, surplus has its access restricted based on loyalty to the class system. People who say "we can't afford to redistribute this" are really saying "We want to maintain our leverage over the poor and weak, because our leverage allows us to keep enriching ourselves at their expense one generation after the next."

Marx says all this using 19th century language and Hegelian forms of expression in Capital but the essence of it is here. He describes "modes of production" based on different forms of exploited labor: Slavery, serfdom, wage labor.

>>2797357
meh, they might. instead anti-marxists must come up with a trans-historical metric to explain why class cuckery is justified in present society instead of class struggle