Turning Points in History

I have tried to show how far we must go and how deeply we must enter into the most everyday aspects of our lives in order to root out the notion of dominating nature.

In so doing, I have tried to emphasize the extent to which the domination of human by human precedes the notion of dominating nature, indeed, even precedes the emergence of classes and the State. I have asked — and tried to answer — how hierarchies emerged, why they emerged, and the way they became increasingly differentiated into initially temporary and, later, firmly based status groups, and, finally, classes and the State.

My purpose has been to let these trends unfold from their own inner logic and examine all their nuanced forms along the way. The reader has been persistently reminded that humanity and its social origins are no less a product of natural evolution than other mammals and their communities; indeed, that human beings can express a conscious creativity in nature’s evolutionary development and can enlarge it — not arrest or reverse it.

Whether humanity will play such a role, I have contended, depends upon the kind of society that emerges and the sensibility society fosters.

It is now important to examine those turning points in history which could have led people to either achieve a rational, ecological society, or an irrational, anti-ecological one.

The Rise of the Warriors

Perhaps the earliest change in social development that veered society in a direction that became seriously harmful, both to humanity and the natural world, was the hierarchical growth of male’s civil domain — namely, the rise of male gerontocracies, warrior groups, aristocratic elites, and the State. To reduce these highly complex developments to “patriarchy,” as many writers are prone to do, is as naive as it is simplistic. “Men” — a generic word that is as vague as the word “humanity” and ignores the oppression of men by men as well as of women by men — did not simply “take over” society. Nor did the male’s civil society simply subvert woman’s domestic world through invasions by patriarchal Indo-European and Semitic pastoralists, important as these invasions may have been in the subjugation of many early horticultural societies. The emphasis of certain eco-feminists, mystics, and Christian or pagan acolytes on this “take-over” and “invasions” theory simply creates another unresolved mystery: how did dramatic changes, like the emergence of patriarchy, occur in the pastoral societies that did the invading? We have evidence that the rise of the male civil domain with its concern for intertribal affairs and warfare gained ascendancy slowly and that some pastoral communities were oriented toward women in such strategic areas as descent and the inheritance of property, however much these communities were led by bellicose warriors.

In many cases, the male’s civil domain developed slowly and probably gained importance with increases in neighboring populations. Men were, in fact, needed to protect the community as a whole — including its women — from other marauding men. Warfare may have even emerged or developed among seemingly “pacific” and matricentric horticultural communities which tried to expel more pristine hunting, and gathering peoples from woodlands that later were turned into farm lands. Let us be quite frank about this: matricentric or pacific as early farming communities may have been, they probably were very warlike in the eyes of the hunters they managed to displace — that is, those hunting peoples and cultures that were by no means predisposed to abandon their free-ranging ways and take up food cultivation. The statements of the great Indian orators, the words of Wovoka, the Paiute Indian messiah of the late nineteenth-century Ghost Dance, on plow agriculture, are still evocative of this mentality: “Shall I plunge a blade into the breast of my mother, the Earth?”

But there can be little doubt that the slow shift from rule by the elderly, later the oldest male or patriarch, the change from the influence of animistic shamans to deity worshiping priesthoods, and the rise of warrior groups that finally culminated in supreme monarchs all formed a major turning point in history toward domination, classes, and the emergence of the State. There is the possibility that matricentric communities of villagers might have shaped a pathway of an entirely different character for humanity as a whole. Based on gardening, simple tools, usufruct, the irreducible minimum, complementarity, and so-called feminine values of care and nurture (which, in any case, have been with us in the socialization of their children up to recent times), society might have taken a relatively benign turn in history. The concern that mothers normally share with their young might have been generalized into a concern that people could have shared with each other. Technical development based on limited wants could have continued very slowly into increasingly more sophisticated social forms and cultural life could have been elaborated with considerable sensitivity.

Whether unavoidable or not, the fact remains that this fork in the road of early history was to be marked by a turn to patriarchal, priestly, monarchical, and statist lines, not along matricentric and nonhierarchical lines. Warrior values of combat, class domination, and state rule were to form the basic infrastructure of all “civilized development no less in Asia than in Europe and no less in large areas of the New World, like Mexico and the Andes, than in the Old World.

The wistful attempts by many people in the ecology and feminist movements to return, in one way or another, to a presumably untroubled Neolithic village world are understandable in the face of “civilization’s” more nightmarish results. But their imagery of this distant world and their growing hatred of civilization as such leaves room for considerable doubt.

Certainly, it is not likely that pristine hunting and gathering communities had more love for equally pristine gardening societies than a Wovoka, whether or not they shared a belief in the same Mother Goddess. Nor is it likely that, with growing population, gardening societies could have retained the tender sentiments celebrated by the more atavistic feminists of our day. Patricentric pastoralists and sea invaders may have telescoped a development that might have been more benign, to be sure, but it would have been one that was difficult to avoid. If “civilization” was conceived in “original sin ” it was probably a “sin” or evil that pitted food cultivators against hunters (both of whom may have been matricentric and animistic) and, much later, pastoralists against food cultivators.

In any case, there was a great deal in tribal and village society — be it composed of hunters or food cultivators — that needed remedying. First of all, tribal and village societies are notoriously parochial, A shared descent, be it fictional or real, leads to an exclusion of the stranger — except, perhaps, when canons of hospitality are invoked. Although the rules of exogamy and the imperatives of trade tend to foster alliances between the “insider” and “outsider” of a tribal and village community, an “outsider” can be killed summarily by an “insider.” Rules of retribution for theft, assault, and murder apply exclusively to the “insider” and his or her relatives, not to any authority that exists apart from the common descent group.

Tribal and village societies, in effect, are very closed societies — closed to outsiders unless they are needed for their skills, to repopulate the community after costly wars and lethal epidemics, or as a result of marriage. And they are closed societies not only to outsiders, but often to cultural and technological innovations. While many cultural traits may spread slowly from one tribal and village community to another, such communities tend to be highly conservative in their view of basic innovations. For better or worse, traditional lifeways tend to become deeply entrenched with the passing of time. Unless they are developed locally, new technologies tend to be resisted — for understandable reasons, to be sure, if one bears in mind the socially disruptive effects they may have on time-honored customs and institutions. But the harsh fact is that this conservatism makes a tribal and village community highly vulnerable to control, indeed, to eradication by other communities that have more effective technological devices.

A second troubling feature of tribal and village societies is their cultural limitations. These are not societies that are likely to develop complex systems of writing, hence the terms “nonliterate and “preliterate” that are used by many anthropologists to designate them. Today, when irrationalism, mysticism, and primitivism have become rather fashionable among affluent middle-class people (ironically, through written works), the inability of nonliterate people to maintain a recorded history and culture, or to communicate through pictographs, is regarded as a pristine blessing. That the absence of alphabetic writing, in fact, not only severely limited the scope of the cultural landscape of early times but even fostered hierarchy, is easily overlooked. Knowledge of lore, ancestral ties, rituals, and survival techniques became the special preserve of the elderly who, through experience, rote learning, or both, were strategically positioned to manipulate younger people.

Gerontocracy, in my view the earliest form of hierarchy, became possible because young people had to consult their elders for knowledge. No scrolls or books were available to replace the wisdom inscribed on the brains of older people. Elders used their monopoly of knowledge with telling effect to establish the earliest form of rule in prehistory. Patriarchy itself owes a good deal of power to the knowledge which the eldest male of a clan commanded by virtue of the experience conferred upon him by age. Writing could easily have democratized social experience and culture — a fact shrewdly known to ruling elites and especially to priesthoods, who retained stringent control over literacy and confined a knowledge of writing to clerks or clerics.

A large literature has emerged, today, that mystifies primitivism. It is important to remind thinking people that humanity was not born into a Hobbesian world of a war of “all against all”; that the two sexes were once complementary to each other culturally as well as economically; that disaccumulation, gift-giving, the irreducible’minimum, and substantive equality formed the basic norms of early organic societies; that humanity lived in a harmonious relationship with nature because it lived in a condition of internal social harmony within the same community. However, we cannot ignore that this innocent world, vulnerable to internal tendencies toward hierarchy as well as invaders who placed them in subjugation to warrior elites, had major flaws that kept humans from the full realization of their potentialities.

The idea of a shared humanitas, that could bring people of ethnically, even tribally, diverse backgrounds together in the common project of building a fully cooperative society for all to enjoy, did not exist. Tribal confederations certainly formed over time, often to mitigate bloody intertribal warfare and for expansionist purposes to displace “other” people of their land. The Iroquois Confederacy is perhaps one of the most celebrated examples of intertribal cooperation based on strong democratic traditions. But it was a Confederacy that was entirely focused on its own interests, for all its merits. Indeed, it earned the bitter hatred of the other Indian peoples like the Hurons and the Illinois, whose lands it invaded and whose communities it ravaged.

The Emergence of the City

After the shift from a matricentric to a patricentric warrior pathway of development, the next major turning point we encounter historically is the emergence and development of the city. The city was to form an entirely new social arena — a territorial arena in which one’s place of residence and economic interests steadily replaced one’s ancestral affinities based on blood ties.

The radical nature of this shift and its impact on history are difficult to appreciate today. Urbanity is so much a part of modern social life that it is simply taken for granted. Moreover, so much emphasis has been placed on the extent to which the city accelerated cultural development (writing, art, religion, philosophy, and science) and the impetus it gave to economic development (technology, classes, and the division of labor between crafts and agriculture) that we often fail to stress the new kinds of human association urbanity produced.

Perhaps for the first time, so far as we can judge, human beings were able to interact with each other with relatively little regard for their ancestral and blood ties. The notion that people were basically alike, irrespective of their tribal and village ancestry, began to gain ascendancy over their ethnic differences. The city increasingly replaced the biological fact of lineage, and the accident of birth into a particular kin group, by the social fact of residence and economic interests. People were not simply born into a distinct social condition; in varying degrees they could begin to choose and change their social condition. Social institutions and the development of a purely human ecumene came to the foreground of society and gradually edged the folk community into the background of social life. Kinship retreated more and more into the private realm of family affairs, and fading clan-type relations began to shrink into the narrower extended family of immediate relatives rather than a far-flung system of clan “cousins.”

What is vastly important about the new social dispensation created by the city was the fact that the stranger or “outsider” could now find a secure place in a large community of human beings. Initially, this new place did not confer equality on the “outsider.” Despite its avowed openness to resident aliens, Periklean Athens, for example, rarely gave them citizenship and the right to plead their court cases, except through the voices of Athenian citizens. But early cities did provide strangers with increased protection from abuse by the “insider.” In many cases of newly emerging cities, a compromise was struck between tribal values based on blood ties and social values based on the realities of residence in which the “outsider” acquired basic rights that tribal society rarely conferred, while restricting citizenship to the “insider” and giving him a wider latitude of civil rights.

Even more than hospitality, then, the city offered the “outsider” de facto or de jure justice — but it did so in the form of protection provided by a monarch and, in later years, by written law codes. Minimally, both the “outsider” and the “insider” were now seen as human beings with a shared body of rights, not simply as mutually exclusive in their humanity and needs. With the rise and development of the city, the germinal idea that all people were in a certain sense one people, came to fruition and achieved a new historic universality.

I do not wish to suggest that this enormous step in developing the idea of a common humanitas occurred overnight or that it was not accompanied by some very questionable changes in the human condition, as we shall see shortly. Perhaps the most liberal cities like the Greek poleis, particularly democratic Athens, ceased to confer citizenship on resident aliens, as I have noted, in Perikles’s time. Solon, a century or so earlier, had indeed freely and openly granted citizenship to all foreigners who brought skills needed by Athens from abroad. Perikles, the most democratic of the Athenian leaders, regrettably abandoned Solon’s liberality and made citizenship a privilege for men of proven Athenian ancestry.

Tribalistic beliefs and institutions also permeated early cities. They lingered on in the form of highly archaic religious views: the deification of ancestors, followed by tribal chiefs who eventually become divine monarchs; patriarchal authority in domestic life; and feudal aristocracies that were inherited from village societies of the late Neolithic and Bronze Ages. On the other hand, in Athens and Rome, the tribal and village assembly form of decision-making was not only retained but revitalized and, in Athens at least, given supreme authority during the Periklean era.

The city existed in tension with these beliefs and institutions. It continually tried to rework traditional religions into civic ones that fostered loyalty to the city. The power of the nobility was steadily eroded and that of the patriarch to command the lives of his sons was repeatedly challenged in order to bring young men into the service civic institutions, such as the bureaucracy and the army.

This tension never completely disappeared. Indeed, it formed on-going drama of civic politics for nearly three thousand years and surfaced in such violent conflicts as the attempts by medieval towns to subdue overbearing territorial nobles and bishops. Cities sought bring rationality, a measure of impartial justice, a cosmopolitan culture and greater individuality to a world that was permeated by mysticism arbitrary power, parochialism, and the subordination of the individual to the command of aristocratic and religious elites.

Legally, at least, the city did not attain civic maturity until the Emperor Caracalla in the third century CE proclaimed all free men in the Roman Empire citizens of Rome. Caracalla’s motives may be justly regarded with suspicion: he was patently interested in expanding the empire’s tax base to meet rising imperial costs. But even as a legal gesture, this act created a worldly sense that all human beings, even slaves, belonged to the same species — that men and women were one, irrespective of their ethnic background, wealth, occupations, or station in life. The notion of a vast human ecumene had received legitimation on a scale that was unknown in the past, except in philosophy and certain religions — Judaism, no less than Christianity.

Caracalla’s edict, to be sure, did not dissolve the parochial barriers that still divided differing ethnic groups, towns, and villages. Inland, near the frontiers of the Empire and beyond, these differences were as strong as they had been for millennia. But the edict, later reinforced by Christianity’s vision of a unified world under the rule of a single creator-deity and a commitment to individual free will, set a new standard for human affinity that could only have emerged with the city and its increasingly cosmopolitan, rationalistic, and individualistic values. It is not accidental that Augustine’s most famous tract in defense of Christianity was called the City of God and that the Christian fathers were to look as longingly toward the city of Jerusalem as did the Jews.

The sweeping social dispensation initiated by the city was not achieved without the loss of many profoundly important attributes of tribal and early village life. The communal ownership of land and of so-called natural resources gave way to private ownership. Classes, those categories based on the ownership and management of these “resources,” crystallized out of more traditional status hierarchies into economic ones, so that slaves stood opposed to masters, plebians to patricians, serfs to lords, and, later, proletarians to capitalists.

Nor did earlier and more basic hierarchies structured around status groups like gerontocracies, patriarchies, chiefdoms, and, in time, bureaucracies, disappear. As largely status groups, they formed the hidden bases for more visible and stormy class relationships. Indeed, status groups were simply taken for granted as a “natural” state of affairs so that the young, women, the sons, and the common masses of people began to enter unthinkingly into complicity with their own elites. Hierarchy, in effect, became embedded in the human unconscious while classes, whose legitimacy was more easy to challenge because of the visibility of exploitation, came to the foreground of an embattled and bitterly divided humanity.

Viewed from its negative side, then, the city consolidated privatization of property in one form or another: class structures, quasi-statist or fully developed statist institutions. A tension between advances achieved by the emergence of the city and the loss of certain archaic but deeply cherished values, including usufruct, complementarity, and the principle of the irreducible minimum, raised a puzzling issue in human development that could properly be called the “social question.” This phrase, once so popular among radical theorists, referred to the fact that “civilization,” despite its many far-reaching advances, has never been fully rational and free of exploitation. To use this phrase more expansively, here, and with a more ethical meaning, one might say that all of humanity’s extraordinary gains under “civilization” have always been tainted by the “evil” of hierarchy.

Evil was not a word that Marx was wont to use when he tried to turn the critique of capitalism into an “objective” science, freed of all moral connotations. But it is to Michael Bakunin’s credit that “evil” was indeed a condition to be reckoned with in his thinking and he quite properly tried to show that many social changes, however “necessary” or unavoidable they seemed in their own time, turned into an “evil” in the overall drama of history. In his Federalism, Socialism, and Anti-Theologism, Bakunin observes: “And I do not hesitate to say that the State is an evil but is a historically necessary evil, as necessary in the past as its complete extinction will be necessary sooner or later, just as necessary as primitive bestiality and theological divagations were necessary to the past.”

Putting Bakunin’s reference to a “primitive bestiality” aside as a prejudice that was understandable more than a century ago, his recognition that humanity developed as much through the medium of “evil” as it did through the medium of “virtue,” touches upon the subtle dialectic of “civilization” itself. Biblical precept did not curse humanity in vain; there is an ancient recognition that certain evils could not easily be avoided in humanity’s ascent out of animality. Human beings were no more aware that they were creating hierarchy when they invested authority in the elders than they were aware that they were creating hierarchy when they invested authority in priesthoods. The ability to reason out certain premises to their conclusion does not come too easily in what is, after all, a largely unconscious primate whose capacity to be rational is more of a potentiality than an actuality. In this respect, preliterate people were no better equipped to deal with the development of their social reality than those who have been tainted by the worst aspects of “civilization.” The “social question” for us, today, exists precisely in the fact that we raised ourselves into the light of freedom with half-open eyes, burdened by dark atavisms, ancient hierarchies, and deeply ingrained prejudices to which we may still regress, if the present counter-Enlightenment of mysticism and antirationalism persists, and that may yet lead us to our ruin. We hold a proverbial knife in our hands that easily could be used to cut both ways — for our emancipation or our ruination.

“Civilization” has sharpened that knife into a razor’s edge, but it has not provided us with a better guide to how we will use so dangerous an instrument beyond the power conferred upon us by consciousness itself.

The Nation-State and Capitalism

A third turning point we encounter historically is the emergence of the nation-state and capitalism The two — the nation-state and capitalism — do not necessarily go together. But capitalism succeeds so rapidly with the rise of the nation-state that they are often seen as co-jointly developing phenomena.

In point of fact, nation-building goes back as far as the twelfth century when Henry II of England and Philip Augustus of France tried to centralize monarchical power and acquire territories that were to eventually form their respective nations. The nation was to slowly eat away at all local power, ultimately pacifying parochial rivalries among baronies and towns. The imperial patrimonies of the ancient world had created immense states, but they were not lasting ones. Patched together from completely different ethnic groups, these empires lived in strange balance with archaic village communities that had hardly changed, culturally and technologically, since Neolithic times.

The main function of this village society was to supply monarchs with tribute and with corvee labor. Otherwise, they were usually left alone. Hence, local life was subterranean, but intense. A great deal of common land existed around these villages which were open to use by all. There is evidence that even “private” land was regularly redistributed to families according to their changing needs. Interference from the top down was often minimal. The greatest dangers to this stable village society came from invading armies and warring nobles. Otherwise they were usually left to themselves, that is, when they were not plundered by aristocrats and tax gatherers.

Justice, in this kind of society, was often arbitrary. The complaints by the Greek farmer, Hesiod, about unfair, self-seeking local barons echoes a long-standing grievance that seldom surfaces in the historical literature we have at our disposal. The great law codes that were handed down by the absolute monarch of Babylonia, Hammurabi, were not the rule in the pre-Roman world. More often than not, avaricious nobles made their own law” to suit their own needs. The peasant may have sought the protection of nobles for himself and his community from pillaging outsiders, but rarely justice. Empires were too big to manage administratively, much less juridically. The Roman Empire was a major exception to this rule, largely because it was mote of a coastal and fairly urbanized entity rather than a vast inland area with very few cities.

European nations, by contrast, were formed out of continents that history sculpted into increasingly manageable territories. Road systems, to be sure, were poor and communication was primitive. But as strong kings emerged like Henry II of England and Philip Augustus of France, royal justice and bureaucrats began to penetrate into once-remote areas and reach deeper into the everyday life of the people. There is no question that the “king’s justice” was welcomed by commoners and his officials acted as a buffer between arrogant nobles and the cowed masses. The early development of the nation-stale, in effect, was marked by a genuine sense of promise and relief.

But the royal power was usually an interest in its own right, not a moral agency for the redress of popular grievances, and it eventually became as oppressive as the local nobles it displaced. Moreover, it was not a pliant tool for achieving the ascendancy of the emerging bourgeoisie. The Stuart kings of England, who catapulted England into revolution in the 1640s, viewed their nations as personal patrimonies which both the powerful nobles and wealthy bourgeoisie threatened to subvert.

The notion that the nation-state was “formed” by the bourgeoisie is a myth that should be dispatched by now. In the first place, what we call a “bourgeois” in the late Middle Ages was nothing like the industrialist or industrial capitalist we know today. Apart from some wealthy banking houses and commercial capitalists engaged in a far-ranging carrying trade, the nascent bourgeois was generally a master craftsman who functioned within a highly restrictive guild system. He seldom exploited a proletarian of the kind we encounter today.

Disparities in wealth, to be sure, eventually gave rise to craftsmen who closed out apprentices and turned their guilds into privileged societies for themselves and their sons. But this was not the rule. In most of Europe, guilds fixed prices, determined the quality and quantity of goods that were produced, and were open to apprentices who, in time, could hope to be masters in their own right This system, which carefully regulated growth, was hardly capitalistic. Work was done mainly by hand in small shops where master sat side by side with apprentice and attended to the needs of a limited, highly personalized market.

By the late Middle Ages, the manorial economy with its elaborate hierarchy and its land-based serfs was in dissolution, although by no means did it disappear completely. Relatively independent farmers began to appear who worked as owners of their land or as tenants of absentee nobles. Looking over the broad landscape of Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, one encounters a highly mixed economy. Together with serfs, tenant farmers, and yeomen, there were craftsmen, some well-to-do and others of modest means, who co-existed with capitalists, most of whom were engaged in commerce rather than industry.

Europe, in effect, was the center of a highly mixed economy, not a capitalistic one, and its technology, despite major advances throughout the Middle Ages, was still based on handicrafts, not on industry. Even mass production, such as the system organized in the huge arsenal of Venice (which employed three thousand workers), involved artisans, each of whom worked in a very traditional fashion in small alcoves and shops.

It is important to stress these features of the world that directly preceded the Industrial Revolution because they greatly conditioned the social options that were open to Europe. Prior to the era of the Stuart monarchy in England, the Bourbon in France, and the Hapsburg in Spain, European towns enjoyed an extraordinary amount of autonomy. Italian and German cities, in particular, although by no means exclusively, formed strong states in their own right, ranging in political forms from simple democracies in their early years, to oligarchies in later periods. They also formed confederations to struggle against local lords, foreign invaders, and absolute monarchs. Civic life flourished in these centuries — not only economically, but culturally. Citizens generally owed their allegiances primarily to their cities and only secondarily to their territorial lords and emerging nations.

The growth of power of the nation-state from the sixteenth century onward became as much a source of conflict as it was a source of order in controlling unruly nobles. Attempts by monarchs to impose royal sovereignty on the towns and cities of the period produced an era of near-insurrectionary attacks on representatives of the crown. Royal records were destroyed, bureaucrats assaulted, and their offices demolished. Although the person of the monarch was given the customary respect accorded to a head of state, his edicts were often ignored and his officials were all but lynched. The Fronde, a series of conflicts initiated by the French nobility and Parisian burghers against growing royal power during the youth of Louis XIV, virtually demolished absolutism and drove the young king out of Paris until the monarchy reasserted its power.

Behind these upsurges in many parts of Europe we find a mounting resistance to encroachments by the centralized nation-state on the prerogatives of the towns and cities. This municipal upsurge reached its height in the early sixteenth century when the cities of Castile rose up against Charles II of Spain and tried to establish what was essentially a municipal confederation. The struggle, which went on for more than a year, ended in the defeat of the Castilian cities after a series of striking victories on their part — and their defeat marked the economic and cultural decline of Spain for nearly three centuries. To the extent that the Spanish monarchy was in the vanguard of royal absolutism during that century and played a major role in European politics, the uprising of the cities — or Comuneros, as their partisans were called — created the prospect of an alternative pathway to the continent’s development toward nation-states: namely, a confederation of towns and cities. Europe genuinely vacillated for a time between these two alternatives and it was not until the late seventeenth century that the nation-state gained ascendancy over a confederal pathway.

Nor did the idea of confederation ever die. It surfaced among radicals in the English Revolution who were condemned by the followers of Cromwell as “Switzering anarchists.” It reappeared, again, in confederations that radical farmers tried to establish in New England in the aftermath of the American Revolution. And, again, in France in radical sectional movements—the neighborhood assemblies of Paris and other French cities established during the Great Revolution — and, finally, in the Paris Commune of 1871, which called for a “Commune of communes” and the dissolution of the nation-state.

In the era that immediately preceded the formation of the nationstate, Europe stood poised at a fork in the historic road. Depending upon the fortunes of the Comuneros and the sans culottes who packed the Parisian sections of 1793, the future of the nation-state hung very much in the balance. Had the continent moved in the direction of urban confederations, its future would have taken a socially more benign course, perhaps even a more revolutionary, democratic, and cooperative form than it was to acquire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

By the same token, it is quite unclear that an industrial capitalist development of the kind that exists today was preordained by history. That capitalism greatly accelerated technological development at a rate that has no precedent in history hardly requires any detailed discussion. And I shall have much to say about what this technological development did to humanity and nature — and what it could do in a truly ecological society. But capitalism, like the nation-state, was neither an unavoidable “necessity,” nor was it a “precondition” for the establishment of a cooperative or socialist democracy.

Indeed, important forces tended to inhibit its development and ascendancy. As a bitterly competitive market system based on production for exchange and the accumulation of wealth, capitalism and a capitalistic mentality, with its emphasis on individual egoism, stood very much at odds with deeply ingrained traditions, customs, and even the lived realities of precapitalist societies. All precapitalist societies had placed a high premium on cooperation rather than competition, however much this emphasis was commonly disregarded or, indeed, used to mobilize collective labor forces in the service of elites and monarchs. Nevertheless, competition as a way of life — as “healthy competition” to use modern bourgeois parlance — was simply inconceivable. Agonistic male behavior in ancient and medieval times, to be sure, was not uncommon, but it was generally focused on public service in one form or another—not on material self-aggrandizement.

The market system was essentially marginal to a precapitalist world, particularly one that emphasized self-sufficiency. Where the market achieved prominence, say, in medieval times, it was carefully regulated by guilds and Christian precepts against the taking of interest and excessive profiteering. Capitalism, to be sure, always existed — as Marx observed, “in the interstices of an ancient world” and, one can add, medieval world — but it largely failed to achieve a socially dominant status. The early bourgeoisie, in fact, did not have overly capitalistic aspirations; its ultimate goals were shaped by the aristocracy so that the capitalists of ancient and medieval times invested their profits in land and tried to live like gentry after retiring from business affairs.

Growth, too, was frowned upon as a serious violation of religious and social taboos. The ideal of “limit ” the classical Greek belief in the “golden mean,” never entirely lost its impact on the precapitalist world. Indeed, from tribal limes well into historical times, virtue was defined as a strong commitment by the individual to the community’s welfare and prestige was earned by disposing of wealth in the form of gifts, not by accumulating it.

Not surprisingly, the capitalist market and the capitalist spirit that emphasized endless growth, accumulation, competition, and still more growth and accumulation for competitive advantages in the market — all encountered endless obstacles in precapitalist societies. The nascent capitalists of the ancient world rarely rose to a status of more than functionaries of imperial monarchs who needed merchants to acquire rare and exotic commodities from faraway places. Their profits were fixed and their social ambitions were curtailed.

The Roman emperors gave a greater leeway to the early bourgeoisie, to be sure, but plundered it freely by means of taxation and episodic expropriations. The medieval world in Europe gave the bourgeoisie a substantially more freer hand, particularly in England, Flanders, and northern Italy. But even in the more individualistic Christian world, capitalists came up against entrenched guild systems that sharply circumscribed the market and were usually mesmerized by aristocratic values of high living that worked against the bourgeois virtues of parsimony and material accumulation.

Indeed, in most of Europe, the bourgeoisie was seen as a contemptible underclass — demonic in its passion for wealth, parvenu in its ambitions to belong to the nobility, culturally unsettling in its proclivity for growth, and threatening in its fascination for technological innovation. Its supremacy in Renaissance Italy and Handers was highly unstable. Free-spending condotierri like the Medici, who gained control of major northern Italian cities, devoured the gains of trade in lavish expenditures for palaces, civic monuments, and warfare. Changes in trade routes, such as the shift of commerce from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic in the years following the Turkish capture of Constantinople (1453), ultimately doomed the Italian city-states to occupy a secondary place in Europe. It was the historic breakthrough of capitalism in England that gave this economy national, and finally global, supremacy.

This breakthrough, too, was not an unavoidable fact of history, nor was the form it took predetermined in any way by suprahuman social forces. The English economy and state were perhaps the most loosely constructed of any in Europe. The monarchy never achieved the absolutism attained by Louis XIV of France, nor was England a clearly definable nation feudalism deeply entrenched in the realm, despite the current English preoccupation with status. In so porous a society with so unstable a history, the merchant and, later,the industrially oriented capitalist found a greater degree of freedom for development there than elsewhere.

The English nobility, in turn, was largely a nouveau elite that had been installed by the Tudor monarchs after the traditional Norman nobility all but destroyed itself in the bloody Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century. The nobles, often of humble birth, were not averse to turning a penny in trade. To raise substantial fortunes by selling wool in the Handers textile industry, they wantonly enclosed the common lands of the peasantry and turned them into sheep runs.

The spread of the capitalist “putting out” system, moreover, in which so-called factors brought wool to family cottages, passing on unfinished yam to weavers and then to dyers, eventually led to the concentration of all the cottagers in “factories,” where they were obliged to work under harsh, exploitative, and highly disciplined conditions. In this way, the new industrial bourgeoisie circumvented the traditional guild restrictions in the towns and brought a growing class of dispossessed proletarians into its service. Each worker could now be competitively played against others in a presumably “free” labor market, driving down the wages and providing immense profits in the new factory system that developed near England’s major urban centers.

In the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 — not to be confused with the stormy English Revolution of the 1640s — the avaricious English nobles and their bourgeois counterparts came to a political compromise. The aristocracy was permitted to run the state, the monarchy was reduced to a mere symbol of interclass unity, and the bourgeoisie was granted a free hand in running the economy. Allowing for quarrels between various ruling elites, the English capitalist class enjoyed the virtually unrestrained right to plunder England and to move its operations abroad to claim India, large parts of Africa, and commercially strategic strongholds in Asia.

Market economies had existed before capitalism. Indeed, they coexisted with fairly communal economies. There are periods in the Middle Ages that bear witness to a fascinating balance between town and country, crafts and agriculture, burghers and food cultivators, and technological innovations and cultural constraints. This world was to be idealized by romantic writers in the nineteenth century and by Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist, who exhibited an acute sensitivity to the various alternatives to capitalism offered by a cooperative society and mentality at various periods in history.

The upsurge of English capitalism in the eighteenth century, and its global outreach in the nineteenth century, altered such prospects radically. For the first time, competition was seen to be “healthy”; trade, as “free”; accumulation, as evidence of “parsimony”; and egoism, as evidence of a self-interest that worked like a “hidden hand” in the service of the public good. Concepts of “health,” “freedom,” “parsimony,” and the “public good” were to subserve unlimited expansion and wanton plunder — not only of nature, but of human beings. No class of proletarians in England suffered less during the Industrial Revolution than the huge bison herds that were exterminated on the American plains. No human values and communities were warped any less than the ecosystems of plants and animals that were despoiled in the original forests of Africa and South America. To speak of “humanity’s” depredation of nature makes a mockery of the unbridled depredation of human by human as depicted in the tormented novels of Charles Dickens and Emile Zola. Capitalism divided the human species against itself as sharply and brutally as it divided society against nature.

Competition began to permeate every level of society, not only to throw capitalist against capitalist for control of the marketplace. It pitted buyer against seller, need against greed, and individual against individual on the most elementary levels of human encounters. In the marketplace, one individual faced another with a snarl, even as working people, each seeking, as a matter of sheer survival, to get the better of the other. No amount of moralizing and pietizing can alter the fact that rivalry at the most molecular base of society is a bourgeois law of life, in the literal sense of the word “life ” Accumulation to undermine, buy out, or otherwise absorb or outwit a competitor is a condition for existence in a capitalist economic order.

That nature, too, is a victim of this competitive, accumulative, and ever-expanding social fury, should be obvious if it were not for the fact that there is a strong tendency to date this social trend’s origins back to technology and industry as such. That modern technology magnifies more fundamental economic factors, notably, growth as a law of life in a competitive economy and the commodification of humanity and nature, is an apparent fact. But technology and industry in themselves do not turn every ecosystem, species, tract of soil, waterway, or, for that matter, the oceans and the air, into mere natural resources. They do not monetize and give a price-tag to everything that could be exploited in the competitive struggle for survival and growth.[11] To speak of “limits to growth” under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits to warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be “persuaded” to limit growth than a human being can be “persuaded” to stop breathing. Attempts to “green” capitalism, to make it “ecological,” are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.

Indeed, the most basic precepts of ecology, such as the concern for balance, a harmonious development toward greater differentiation, and ultimately, the evolution of greater subjectivity and consciousness, stand radically at odds with an economy that homogenizes society, nature, and the individual, and that divides human against human and society against nature with a ferocity that must ultimately tear down the planet.

For generations, radical theorists opined about the “inner limits” of the capitalist system, the “internal” mechanisms within its operations as an economy, that would yield its self-destruction. Marx gained the plaudits of endless writers for advancing the possibility that capitalism would be destroyed and replaced by socialism because it would enter a chronic crisis of diminishing profits, economic stagnation, and class war with an ever-impoverished proletariat In the face of vast biogeochemical dislocations that have opened vast holes in the earth’s ozone layer and increased the temperature of the planet by the “greenhouse effect,” these limits are now clearly ecological. Whatever may be the destiny of capitalism as a system that has “internal limits” economically, we can emphatically say that it has external limits ecologically.

Indeed, capitalism completely incarnates Bakunin’s notion of “evil” without the qualification that it is “socially necessary.” Beyond the capitalist system there are no further “turning points in history.” Capitalism marks the end of the road for a long social development in which evil permeated the good and irrationality permeated the rational. Capitalism, in effect, constitutes the point of absolute negativity for society and the natural world. One cannot improve this social order, reform it, or remake it on its own terms with an ecological prefix such as “eco-capitalism.” The only choice one has is to destroy it, for it embodies every social disease — from patriarchal values, class exploitation, and statism to avarice, militarism, and now, growth for the sake of growth — that has afflicted “civilization” and tainted all its great advances.