imposed the condition that they should transfer the title of their lots to him, and in return he assured them of the free enjoyment of their land for life--a trick which the holy church remembered and freely imitated during the ninth and tenth century, for the greater glory of God. In the fifth century, however, about the year 475, Bishop Salvianus of Marseilles still vehemently denounced such robbery and relates that the methods of the Roman officials and great landlords became so oppressive that many "Romans" fled to the districts occupied by the barbarians and feared nothing so much as a return under Roman rule. That poor parents frequently sold their children into slavery, is proved by a law forbidding this practice.
In return for liberating the Romans from their own state, the barbarians appropriated two-thirds of the entire land and divided it among themselves. The distribution was made by gentile rules. As the number of the conquerors was relatively small, large tracts remained undivided in the possession of the nation, the tribe or the gens. Every gens distributed the land for cultivation and pastures to the individual households by drawing lots. We do not know whether repeated divisions took place at that time. At any rate, this practice was soon discarded in the Roman provinces, and the individual lot became salable private property, a so-called freehold (allodium). Forests and pastures remained undivided for collective use. This use and the mode of cultivating the divided land was regulated by tradition and the will of the community.
The longer the gens lived in its village, and the better Germans and Romans became amalgamated in the course of time, the more did the character of kinship lose ground before territorial bounds. The gens disappeared in the mark commune, the members of which, however, still exhibited traces of kinship. In the countries where mark communes were still preserved--in the North of France, in England, Germany and Scandinavia--the gentile constitution gradually merged into a local constitution and thus acquired the capacity of being fitted into a state. Nevertheless this local constitution retained some of the primeval democratic character which distinguishes the whole gentile order, and thus preserved a piece of gentilism even in its enforced degeneration of later times. This left a weapon in the hands of the oppressed, ready to be wielded by them even in the present time.
The rapid loss of the bonds of blood in the gens as a result of conquest caused the degeneration of the tribal and national organs of gentilism.
We know that the rule over subjugated people does not agree with the gentile constitution. Here we have an opportunity to observe this on a large scale. The German nations, masters of the Roman provinces, had to organize their conquests. But they could neither adopt the Romans as a body into their gentes, nor rule them by the help of gentile organs. A substitute for them had to be placed at the head of the Roman administrative bodies that were largely retained in local affairs, and this substitute could only be another state. Hence the organs of the gentile constitution had to become organs of the state, and under the pressure of the moment this took place very rapidly. Now the first representative of the conquering nation was the military leader. The internal and external security of the conquered territory demanded that his power should be strengthened. The moment had arrived for the transition from war leadership to monarchy. And the change took place.
Take e. g. the realm of the Franks. The victorious Salians had not only come into possession of the extensive Roman state dominions, but also of all the large tracts that had not been assigned to the more or less small mark communities, especially of all large forest tracts. The first thing which the king of the Franks, now a real monarch, did was to change this national property into royal property, to steal it from the people and to donate or give it in lien to his retainers. This retinue, originally composed of his personal war followers and of the subcommanders of the army, was increased by Romans, i. e., romanized Gauls who quickly became invaluable to the king through their knowledge of writing, their education and their familiarity with the language and laws of the country, and with the language of Latin literature. But slaves, serfs and freed slaves also became his courtiers. From among all these he chose his favorites. At first they received donations of public land, and later on these benefits were generally conferred for the lifetime of the king. The foundation of a new nobility was thus laid at the expense of the people.
But this was not all. The wide expanse of the empire could not be governed by means of the old gentile constitution. The council of chiefs, if it had not become obsolete long ago, could not have held any more meetings. It was soon displaced by the standing retinue of the king. A pretense at the old public meeting was still kept up, but it also was more and more limited to the meeting of the subcommanders of the army and the rising nobles.
Just as formerly, the Roman farmers during the last period of the republic, so now the free land-owning peasants, the mass of the Frank people, were exhausted and reduced to penury by continual civil feuds and wars of conquest. They who once had formed the whole army and, after the conquest of France, its picked body, were so impoverished at the end of the ninth century that hardly more than every fifth man could go to war. The former army of free peasants, convoked directly by the king, was replaced by an army composed of dependents of the new nobles. Among these servants were also villeins, the descendants of the peasants who had acknowledged no master but the king and a little earlier not even a king. Under Charlemagne's successors the ruin of the Frank peasantry was aggravated by internal wars, weakness of the royal power and corresponding overbearance of the nobles. The latter had received another addition to their ranks through the installation by Charlemagne of "Gau"[35] (district) counts who strove to make their offices hereditary. The invasions of the Normans completed the wreck of the peasantry. Fifty years after the death of Charlemagne, France lay as resistless at the feet of the Normans, as four hundred years previous the Roman empire had lain at the feet of the Franks.
Not only was the external impotence almost the same, but also the internal order or rather disorder of society. The free Frank peasants found themselves in a similar position as their predecessors, the Roman colonists. Ruined by wars and robberies, they had been forced to seek the protection of the nobles or the church, because the royal power was too weak to shield them. But they had to pay dearly for this protection.
Like the Gallic farmers, they had to transfer the titles of their land to their patrons, and received it back from them as tenants in different and varying forms, but always only in consideration of services and tithes. Once driven into this form of dependence, they gradually lost their individual liberty. After a few generations most of them became serfs. How rapidly the free peasants sank from their level is shown by the land records of the abbey Saint Germain des Pres, then near, now in, Paris. On the vast holdings of this abbey in the surrounding country 2788 households, nearly all of them Franks with German names, were living at Charlemagne's time; 2080 of them were colonists, 35 lites,[36] 220 slaves and only 8 freeholders. The practice of the patrons to demand the transfer of the land titles to themselves and give the former owners the use of the land for life, denounced as ungodly by Salvianus, was now universally practiced by the Church in its dealings with the peasants.
The compulsory labor that now came more and more into vogue, had been moulded as much after the Roman angariae, compulsory service for the state, as after the services of the German mark men in bridge and road building and other work for common purposes. By all appearances, then, the mass of the population had arrived at the same old goal after four hundred years.
That proved two things: Firstly, that the social differentiation and the division of property in the sinking Roman empire corresponded perfectly to the contemporaneous stage of production in agriculture and industry, and hence was unavoidable; secondly, that this stage of production had not been essentially altered for better or worse during four hundred years, and therefore had necessarily produced the same division of property and the same classes of population. The town had lost its supremacy over the country during the last centuries of the Roman empire, and had not regained it during the first centuries of German rule. This presupposes a low stage of agriculture and industry. Such a general condition produces of necessity the domination of great proprietors and the dependence of small farmers. How impossible it was to graft either the slave labor of Roman latifundian economy or the compulsory labor of the new large scale production into such a society, is proved by Charlemagne's very extensive experiments with his famous imperial country residences that left hardly a trace. These experiments were continued only by the convents and brought results only for them.
But the convents were abnormal social institutions, founded on celibacy.
They could do exceptional work, but they had to remain exceptions themselves for this very reason.
Yet some progress had been made during these four hundred years.
Although in the end we find the same main classes as in the beginning, still the human beings that made up these classes had changed. The ancient slavery had disappeared; gone were also the beggared freemen who had despised work as slavish. Between the Roman colonist and the new serf, there had been the free Frank peasant. The "useless remembrance and the vain feud" of the decaying Roman nation was dead and gone. The social classes of the ninth century had been formed during the travail of a new civilization, not in the demoralization of a sinking one. The new race, masters and servants, were a race of men as compared to their Roman predecessors. The relation of powerful landlords to serving peasants, which had been the unavoidable result of collapse in the antique world, was for the Franks the point of departure on a new line of development. Moreover, unproductive as these four hundred years may appear, they left behind one great product: the modern nationalities, the reorganization and differentiation of West European humanity for the coming history. The Germans had indeed infused a new life into Europe.
Therefore the dissolution of the states in the German period did not end in a subjugation after the Norse-Saracene plan, but in a continued development of the estate of the royal beneficiaries and an increasing submission (commendatio) to feudalism, and in such a tremendous increase of the population, that no more than two centuries later the bloody drain of the crusades could be sustained without injury.
What was the mysterious charm by which the Germans infused a new life into decrepit Europe? Was it an innate magic power of the German race, as our jingo historians would have it? By no means. Of course, the Germans were a highly gifted Aryan branch and, especially at that time, in full process of vigorous development. They did not, however, rejuvenate Europe by their specific national properties, but simply by their barbarism, their gentile constitution.
Their personal efficiency and bravery, their love of liberty, and their democratic instinct which regarded all public affairs as its own affairs, in short all those properties which the Romans had lost and which were alone capable of forming new states and raising new nationalities out of the muck of the Roman world--what were they but characteristic marks of the barbarians in the upper stage, fruits of the gentile constitution?
If they transformed the antique form of monogamy, mitigated the male rule in the family and gave a higher position to women than the classic world had ever known, what enabled them to do so, unless it was their barbarism, their gentile customs, their living inheritance of the time of maternal law?
If they could safely transmit a trace of the genuine gentile order, the mark communes, to the feudal states of at least three of the most important countries--Germany, North of France, and England--and thus give a local coherence and the means of resistance to the oppressed class, the peasants, even under the hardest medieval serfdom; means which neither the slaves of antiquity nor the modern proletarian found ready at hand--to whom did they owe this, unless it was again their barbarism, their exclusively barbarian mode of settling in gentes?
And in conclusion, if they could develop and universally introduce the mild form of servitude which they had been practicing at home, and which more and more displaced slavery also in the Roman empire--to whom was it due, unless it was again their barbarism, thanks to which they had not yet arrived at complete slavery, neither in the form of the ancient labor slaves, nor in that of the oriental house slaves?
This milder form of servitude, as Fourier first stated, gave to the oppressed the means of their gradual emancipation as a class (fournit aux cultivateurs des moyens d'affranchissement collectif et progressif) and is therefore far superior to slavery, which permits only the immediate enfranchisement of the individual without any transitory stage. Antiquity did not know any abolition of slavery by rebellion, but the serfs of the middle ages gradually enforced their liberation as a class.
Every vital and productive germ with which the Germans inoculated the Roman world, was due to barbarism. Indeed, only barbarians are capable of rejuvenating a world laboring under the death throes of unnerved civilization. And the higher stage of barbarism, to which and in which the Germans worked their way up previous to the migrations, was best calculated to prepare them for this work. That explains everything.
FOOTNOTES: [30] Author's note.
The number assumed here is confirmed by a passage of Diodorus on the Celts of Gaul: "Many nations of unequal strength are living in Gaul. The strongest of them numbers about 200,000, the weakest 50,000." (Diodorus Siculus, V., 25.) That gives an average of 125,000. The individual nations of Gaul, being more highly developed, should be gauged more numerous than those of Germany.
3861 square statute miles.
[32] A German geographical mile contains 7,420.44 meters, or 7.42044 kilometers; hence a German geographical square mile contains 55.0629 square kilometers, equal to 21.2598 square statute miles.
The Ingaevonians comprised the Friesians, the Saxons, the Jutes and the Angles, living on the coast of the North Sea from the Zuider Zee to Denmark.
[34] Author's note.
According to Bishop Liutprand of Cremona, the main industry of Verdun in the tenth century, in the so-called Holy German Empire, was the manufacture of eunuchs, who were exported with great profit to Spain for the harems of the Moors.
The "Gau" is a larger territory than the "Mark." Caesar and Tacitus called it pagus.
The name given in ancient law to dependent farmers.
CHAPTER IX.
BARBARISM AND CIVILIZATION.
Having observed the dissolution of the gentile order in the three concrete cases of the Greek, Roman, and German nations, we may now investigate in conclusion the general economic conditions that began by undermining the gentile organization of society during the upper stage of barbarism and ended by doing away with it entirely at the advent of civilization. Marx's "Capital" will be as necessary for the successful completion of this task as Morgan's "Ancient Society."
A growth of the middle stage and a product of further development during the upper stage of savagery, the gens reached its prime, as near as we can judge from our sources of information, in the lower stage of barbarism. With this stage, then, we begin our investigation.
In our standard example, the American redskins of that time, we find the gentile constitution fully developed. A tribe had differentiated into several gentes, generally two. Through the increase of the population, these original gentes again divided into several daughter gentes, making the mother gens a phratry. The tribe itself split up into several tribes, in each of which we again meet a large number of representatives of the old gentes. In certain cases a federation united the related tribes. This simple organization fully sufficed for the social conditions out of which it had grown. It was nothing else than the innate, spontaneous expression of those conditions, and it was well calculated to smooth over all internal difficulties that could arise in this social organization. External difficulties were settled by war.
Such a war could end in the annihilation of a tribe, but never in its subjugation. It is the grandeur and at the same time the limitation of the gentile order that it has no room either for masters or servants.
There were as yet no distinctions between rights and duties. The question whether he had a right to take part in public affairs, to practice blood revenge or to demand atonement for injuries would have appeared as absurd to an Indian, as the question whether it was his duty to eat, sleep, and hunt. Nor could any division of a tribe or gens into different classes take place. This leads us to the investigation of the economic basis of those conditions.
The population was very small in numbers. It was collected only on the territory of the tribe. Next to this territory was the hunting ground surrounding it in a wide circle. A neutral forest formed the line of demarcation from other tribes. The division of labor was quite primitive. The work was simply divided between the two sexes. The men went to war, hunted, fished, provided the raw material for food and the tools necessary for these pursuits. The women cared for the house, and prepared food and clothing; they cooked, weaved and sewed. Each sex was master of its own field of activity; the men in the forest, the women in the house. Each sex also owned the tools made and used by it; the men were the owners of the weapons, of the hunting and fishing tackle, the women of the household goods and utensils. The household was communistic, comprising several, and often many, families.[37] Whatever was produced and used collectively, was regarded as common property: the house, the garden, the long boat. Here, and only here, then, do we find the "self-earned property" which jurists and economists have falsely attributed to civilized society, the last deceptive pretext of legality on which modern capitalist property is leaning.
But humanity did not everywhere remain in this stage. In Asia they found animals that could be tamed and propagated in captivity. The wild buffalo cow had to be hunted down; the tame cow gave birth to a calf once a year, and also furnished milk. Some of the most advanced tribes--Aryans, Semites, perhaps also Turanians--devoted themselves mainly to taming, and later to raising and tending, domestic animals.
The segregation of cattle raising tribes from the rest of the barbarians constitutes the first great division of social labor. These stock raising tribes did not only produce more articles of food than the rest of the barbarians, but also different kinds of products. They were ahead of the others by having at their disposal not alone milk, milk products, and a greater abundance of meat, but also skins, wool, goat's hair, and the spun and woven goods which the growing abundance of the raw material brought into common use. This for the first time made a regular exchange of products possible. In former stages, exchange could only take place occasionally, and an exceptional ability in manufacturing weapons and tools may have led to a transient division of labor. For example, unquestionable remains of workshops for stone implements of the neolithic period have been found in many places. The artists who developed their ability in those shops, most probably worked for the collectivity, as did the artisans of the Indian gentile order. At any rate, no other exchange than that within the tribe could exist in that stage, and even that was an exception. But after the segregation of the stock raising tribes we find all the conditions favorable to an exchange between groups of different tribes, and to a further development of this mode of trading into a fixed institution. Originally, tribe exchanged with tribe through the agency of their tribal heads. But when the herds drifted into the hands of private individuals, then the exchange between individuals prevailed more and more, until it became the established form. The principal article of exchange which the stock raising tribes offered to their neighbors was in the form of domestic animals. Cattle became the favorite commodity by which all other commodities were measured in exchange. In short, cattle assumed the functions of money and served in this capacity as early as that stage. With such necessity and rapidity was the demand for a money commodity developed at the very beginning of the exchange of commodities.
Horticulture, probably unknown to the Asiatic barbarians of the lower stage, arose not later than the middle stage of barbarism, as the forerunner of agriculture. The climate of the Turanian Highland does not admit of a nomadic life without a supply of stock feed for the long and hard winter. Hence the cultivation of meadows and grain was indispensable. The same is true of the steppes north of the Black Sea.
Once grain had been grown for cattle, it soon became human food. The cultivated land belonged as yet to the tribe and was assigned first to the gens, which in its turn distributed it to the households, and finally to individuals; always for use only, not for possession. The users may have had certain claims to the land, but that was all.
Two of the industrial acquisitions of this stage are especially important. The first is the weaving loom, the second the melting of metal ore and the use of metals in manufacture. Copper, tin, and their alloy, bronze, were the most essential of them. Bronze furnished tools and weapons, but could not displace stone implements. Only iron could have done that, but the production of iron was as yet unknown. Gold and silver were already used for ornament and decoration, and must have been far more precious than copper and bronze.
The increase of production in all branches--stock raising, agriculture, domestic handicrafts--enabled human labor power to produce more than was necessary for its maintenance. It increased at the same time the amount of daily work that fell to the lot of every member of a gens, a household, or a single family. The addition of more labor power became desirable. It was furnished by war; the captured enemies were transformed into slaves. Under the given historical conditions, the first great division of social labor, by increasing the productivity of labor, adding to the wealth, and enlarging the field of productive activity, necessarily carried slavery in its wake. Out of the first great division of social labor arose the first great division of society into two classes: masters and servants, exploiters and exploited.
How and when the herds were transferred from the collective ownership of the tribe or gens to the proprietorship of the heads of the families, is not known to us. But it must have been practically accomplished in this stage. The herds and the other new objects of wealth brought about a revolution in the family. Procuring the means of existence had always been the man's business. The tools of production were manufactured and owned by him. The herds were the new tools of production, and their taming and tending was his work. Hence he owned the cattle and the commodities and slaves obtained in exchange for them. All the surplus now resulting from production fell to the share of the man. The woman shared in its fruition, but she could not claim its ownership. The "savage" warrior and hunter had been content to occupy the second place in the house, to give precedence to the woman. The "gentler" shepherd, standing on his wealth, assumed the first place and forced the woman back into the second place. And she had no occasion to complain. The division of labor in the family had regulated the distribution of property between man and wife. This division of labor remained unchanged. Yet the former domestic relation was now reversed, simply because the division of labor outside of the family had been altered.
The same cause that once had secured the supremacy in the house for women, viz., the confining of women's activity to domestic labor, now assured the supremacy of the men in the households. The domestic labor of women was considered insignificant in comparison to men's work for a living. The latter was everything, the former a negligible quantity. At this early stage we can already see that the emancipation of women and their equality with men are impossible and remain so, as long as women are excluded from social production and restricted to domestic labor.
The emancipation of women becomes feasible only then when women are enabled to take part extensively in social production, and when domestic duties require their attention in a minor degree. This state of things was brought about by the modern great industries, which not only admit of women's liberal participation in production, but actually call for it and, besides, endeavor to transform domestic work also into a public industry.
Man's advent to practical supremacy in the household marked the removal of the last barrier to his universal supremacy. His unlimited rule was emphasized and endowed with continuity by the downfall of matriarchy, the introduction of patriarchy, and the gradual transition from the pairing family to the monogamic family. This made a breach in the old gentile order. The monogamic family became a power and lifted a threatening hand against the gens.
The next step brings us to the upper stage of barbarism, that period in which all nations of civilization go through their heroic era. It is the time of the iron sword, but also of the iron plow share and axe. The iron had become the servant of man. It is the last and most important of all raw products that play a revolutionary role in history; the last--if we except the potato.
Iron brought about agriculture on a larger scale and the clearing of extensive forest tracts for cultivation. It gave to the craftsman a tool of such hardness and sharpness that no stone, no other known metal, could withstand it. All this came about gradually. The first iron was often softer than bronze. Therefore stone implements disappeared very slowly. Not only in the Hildebrand Song, but also at Hastings in 1066, stone axes were still used in fighting. But progress was now irresistible, less interrupted and more rapid. The town, inclosing houses of stone or tiles within its turreted and crested stone walls, became the central seat of the tribe or federation of tribes. It showed an astounding progress of architecture, but also an increase of danger and of the demand for protection. Wealth increased rapidly, but it was the wealth of private individuals. Weaving, metal work and other more and more differentiating industries developed an increasing variety and display of art in production. Agriculture furnished not alone grain, peas, beans and fruit, but also oil and wine, the preparation of which had now been learned. Such a diversity of action could not be displayed by any single individual. The second great division of labor took place: handicrafts separated from agriculture. The growing intensity of production and the increased productivity enhanced the value of human labor power. Slavery, which had been a rising and sporadic factor in the preceding stage, now became an essential part of the social system. The slaves ceased to be simple assistants. They were now driven in scores to the work in the fields and shops. The division of production into two great branches, agriculture and handicrafts, gave rise to production for exchange, the production of commodities. Trade arose at the same time, not only in the interior and on the tribal boundaries, but also in the form of maritime exchange. All this was as yet in a very undeveloped state. The precious metals gained preference as a universal money commodity, but still uncoined and exchanged merely by dead weight.
The distinction between rich and poor was added to that between free men and slaves. This and the new division of labor constitute a new division of society into classes. The differences in the amount of property belonging to the several family heads broke up the old communistic households one by one, wherever they might have been preserved thus far.
This made an end to the collective cultivation of the soil for the account of the community. The cultivated land was assigned for use to the several families, first for a limited time, later for once and all.
The transition to full private property was accomplished gradually and simultaneously with the transition from the pairing family to monogamy.
The monogamous family began to be the economic unit of society.
The increase of population necessitated a closer consolidation against internal and external foes. The federation of related tribes became unavoidable. Their amalgamation, and thence the amalgamation of the separate tribal territories to one national territory, was the following step. The military leader--rex, basileus, thiudans--became an indispensable and standing official. The public meeting was introduced wherever it did not yet exist. The military leader, the council of chiefs, and the public meeting formed the organs of the military democracy that had grown out of the gentile constitution. Military democracy--for now war and organization for war were regular functions of social life. The wealth of the neighbors excited the greed of nations that began to regard the acquisition of wealth as one of the main purposes of their life. They were barbarians: robbing appeared to them easier and more honorable than producing. War, once simply a revenge for transgressions or a means for enlarging a territory that had become too narrow, was now waged for the sake of plunder alone and became a regular profession. Not in vain did threatening walls cast a rigid stare all around the new fortified towns: their yawning ditches were the tomb of the gentile constitution, and their turrets already reached up into civilization. The internal affairs underwent a similar change. The plundering wars increased the power of the military leader and of the subcommanders. The habitual election of the successors from the same family was gradually transformed into hereditary succession, first by sufferance, then by claim, and finally by usurpation. Thus the foundation of hereditary royalty and nobility was laid. In this manner the organs of the gentile constitution were gradually torn away from their roots in the nation, tribe, phratry and gens, and the whole gentile order reversed into its antithesis. The organization of tribes for the purpose of the free administration of affairs was turned into an organization for plundering and oppressing their neighbors. The organs of gentilism changed from servants of the public will to independent organs of rule oppressing their own people. This could not have happened, if the greed for wealth had not divided the gentiles into rich and poor; if the "difference of property in a gens had not changed the community of interest into antagonism of the gentiles" (Karl Marx); and if the extension of slavery had not begun by branding work for a living as slavish and more ignominious than plundering.
* * * * * We have now reached the threshold of civilization. This stage is inaugurated by a new progress in the division of labor. In the lower stage of barbarism production was carried on for use only; any acts of exchange were confined to single cases when a surplus was accidentally realized. In the middle stage of barbarism we find that the possession of cattle gave a regular surplus to the nomadic nations with sufficiently large herds. At the same time there was a division of labor between nomadic nations and backward nations without herds. The existence of two different stages of production side by side furnished the conditions necessary for a regular exchange. The upper stage of barbarism introduced a new division of labor between agriculture and handicrafts, resulting in the production of a continually increasing amount of commodities for the special purpose of exchange, so that exchange between individuals became a vital function of society.
Civilization strengthened and intensified all the established divisions of labor, especially by rendering the contrast between city and country more pronounced. Either the town may have the economic control over the country, as during antiquity, or vice versa, as in the middle ages. A third division of labor was added by civilization: it created a class that did not take part in production, but occupied itself merely with the exchange of products--the merchants. All former attempts at class formation were exclusively concerned with production. They divided the producers into directors and directed, or into producers on a more or less extensive scale. But here a class appears for the first time that captures the control of production in general and subjugates the producers to its rule, without taking the least part in production. A class that makes itself the indispensable mediator between two producers and exploits them both under the pretext of saving them the trouble and risk of exchange, of extending the markets for their products to distant regions, and of thus becoming the most useful class in society; a class of parasites, genuine social ichneumons, that skim the cream off production at home and abroad as a reward for very insignificant services; that rapidly amass enormous wealth and gain social influence accordingly; that for this reason reap ever new honors and ever greater control of production during the period of civilization, until they at last bring to light a product of their own--periodical crises in industry.
At the stage of production under discussion, our young merchant class had no inkling as yet of the great future that was in store for them.