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Sources of hope – life before capitalism

Many values that today’s societies take for granted are very recent interlopers in human history. Life before capitalism was not devoid of pleasure – and was certainly not as individualistic. Modern attempts to create alternatives can draw inspiration from the past, not only from less acquisitive, more communitarian societies, but also from heroic examples of resistance.

‘If you want to find out more, you have to move backward against the flow of time, while simultaneously moving forward.’

Cees Nooteboom¹

Capitalism as a total world system is a relatively new part of human experience. It has its roots in the 16th and 17th centuries, which means that it has been around for four or five hundred years at most, while we humans (Homo sapiens) have been around for 200,000 years, reaching anatomical maturity some 50,000 years ago. Our ancestors (the less predatory Homo erectus) go back over a million years. By these measures capitalism is merely the blink of an eye.

Yet for most people living today this short time span is difficult to grasp. Partly this is because we have no relatives that remember pre-capitalism, and the oral tradition that used to pass historical knowledge from generation to generation has largely been disrupted by first literate and then media culture. There have been so many rapid technological changes over the past century that they add up to a kind of rupture in human memory. We have become future-oriented, addicted to novelty and ‘into’ discovering (and possessing) the latest thing in our rootless consumer universe. Pre-capitalism is today the preserve of academic specialists or isolated tribal remnants and remote villages. Yet it is well worth reflecting on what life was like before capitalism.

Happiness is not a modern invention

The doctrine of progress that accompanied the rise of capitalism would have it that, in the words of that early advocate of the rule of property, Thomas Hobbes, life before capitalism was ‘nasty, brutish and short’.² This is a self-serving half-truth. There was certainly brutality and slavery, and the absolute power of warlords and despots was only partially kept in check by custom and the limited killing capacity of the primitive weaponry then to hand. Human happiness, reflection, resilience and initiative are not, however, creations of market society but flourished in medieval abbeys, amongst Paleolithic hunter gatherers, in Neolithic villages, ancient Greek city-states, among the pastoralists whose herds wandered Asia and Africa, in the indigenous communities of the Americas. In all periods of history from the Paleolithic through the Neolithic right up to the Late Feudal, people enjoyed their food, loved their children, thought about the universe and its meaning and tried to live according to their values.

The further you go back, the more disdainful the judgments of the modern conceits of progress come to seem. The notion that the lives of early hunter-gatherers were impossibly difficult is today challenged by many anthropologists, including Marshall Sahlins in his classic work Stone Age Economics.³ Sahlins makes the case that hunter-gatherers had far more leisure time than we do today (provided, of course, that we are lucky enough to have jobs). Their lives depended on seasonal factors and the bounty of the local ecosystem. It is now widely accepted that traditional hunter-gatherer societies often took the form of a kind of primitive communism, which was horizontal in its organizational structure. The North American tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy or the Pueblos of the US Southwest, who lived in communal decentralized communities, were more the rule, while the imperial Aztecs of Mexico and hierarchical Incas of Peru were more the exception. These horizontal communities show a rich variation in organization, with women often playing an important role in government, as they did among the Iroquois. The French anthropologist Pierre Clastres argues that political arrangements in many tribal societies were put in place precisely as insurance against the emergence of despotic power (in other words, ‘the state’).⁴ He held that such arrangements only broke down with the emergence of a caste of priestly leaders who claimed a special relationship with a higher deity. The move away from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural communities and eventually large-scale hydrological agriculture (which took place initially in riverine societies in what is today Iraq and Egypt) also saw the advent of a much stricter division of labor and the rise of the coercive political power of the state. Life expectancy actually fell in this new situation.

The kind of individualism that has developed under capitalism was virtually unknown in early societies and would have appeared strange indeed to both hunter-gatherers and the first agriculturalists. Right up until the decline of classic feudalism and the emergence of the city-states of Italy and Holland, followed by mercantilist England, what we think of as self-serving human nature was the exception in a world hemmed in by social and religious obligation. The rise of the system of Atlantic trade, including colonialism and the globalization of slavery, meant a wholesale assault on these traditional systems of organization – rich in their variety from imperial China, to Aztec Mexico and the Ashanti kingdoms of West Africa. Traditional systems varied from large-scale centralized empires to localized (and jealously defended) traditions of self-rule. The Aymara and Quechua peoples of the Andean highlands are today using the pre-Inca tradition of ayllu (a self-governing, highly flexible form of home community based on collective rights) as a way of resisting outside domination. For these people (and many others), these traditions are not museum pieces but can be ‘re-inscribed’ as part of a living tradition that has shown a remarkable ability to adapt in order to survive.

Losing our diversity

The point is not that these were the pre-capitalist ‘good old days’ but that, until relatively recently, life was different from that which we experience in today’s market and commodity-dominated society. Sometimes it was better; sometimes worse. But it was always different. This is a truth that the partisans of contemporary market progress like to avoid; perhaps because what was different before could be different again. It is the diversity of real possibility that we are losing under the homogenizing influence of corporate capitalism. Today, the large institutions that shape the world economy (the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization) lay down rules of trade and investment that they insist that we all must live by from Mongolia to Mozambique. They bury centuries-old differences in an avalanche of commercial rules so as to bring order in the form of their particular notion of profit-based calculation. These rules are usually shaped not to accord with the desires and needs of the people most affected but rather to provide a degree of predictability for the large corporate organizations and capital or bond markets that structure finance. Their greatest horror is when some significant player steps outside their rules by threatening default on debt, violating investor ‘rights’ or making wealthy creditors (rather than ordinary citizens) take the economic cold plunge. Such heresies can be remarkably successful ways of dealing with economic crisis, as populist governments in Argentina (2002) and Iceland (2008) have recently proved.

Anthropology teaches us that diversity in rules, habits and social forms has always been the human way. This is why it would be easy to fill these pages with examples of those who have insisted (and still insist) on resisting capitalist monoculture, whether that comes in the form of self-serving commercial rules, politics as the sole preserve of professional politicians or the culture of celebrity and gadget worship. But too often the insistence on difference becomes just another niche marketing opportunity. The system feeds on the very dissatisfaction and predictability it has manufactured to sell new forms of ‘renegade authenticity’, particularly to young people desperate to escape the boredom and limits they have inherited. Thus revolt easily becomes just another species of the rootless consumer appetite that drives us on. What we need is to take strength from the spirit of our many ancestors and look for real diversity – not as a consumer choice but as an insistence on living and valuing differently.

Particular societies bring out a variety of different potentials in human beings, encouraging some while discouraging others. Some of these point in a quite different direction from that of our current market society. The Reformation and its followers in Germany and elsewhere worked to build a communalist New Jerusalem. The Potlatch ceremony indicated a very different attitude towards wealth, in which the most successful of tribal chiefs on the North American west coast displayed their wealth by giving it away; accumulation for its own sake would have been considered an anathema. Feudal reciprocity was the way in which the titled aristocracy took some responsibility for the well-being of their vassals. Harvest festivals were the way in which agricultural societies paid homage to natural bounty for sustaining them.

The commons played a large role in both economy and society all through the experience of pre-capitalist societies of various types – the commons being a shared resource from which each had the right to draw their livelihood, even if this livelihood was unequally shared under feudal conditions. The health of the commons – pasture land, gardens, woodland, water supply – was the concern of all. Economy was, as Karl Polanyi has so brilliantly analyzed, ‘socially embedded’ in such societies and subject to the prevailing values of that particular society rather than the kind of all-determining external force it has become under capitalism.⁵ As market relations began to disentangle the economic from the social and cultural, fewer and fewer human checks remained to slow down or redirect the disembodied drive for profit. Today we experience the economy as a kind of out-of-control external force disconnected from human will. We speak of the stock market, for example, as if it is a living person – sometimes confident, sometimes jittery, feeling robust, suffering an attack of nerves and so on; a kind of Old Testament Mammon god.

On the other hand, it is undeniable that the rise of market society kicked off what was to become a dramatic growth in individual rights. While many of these rights had to do with property, others formed the basis of the current constitutional order, of what we think of as democratic governance (at least in certain times in certain societies). Ironically, such rights continue to be used to oppose the concentration of wealth and power that was also a by-product of the rise of market society – which explains the very ambivalent feelings about these freedoms displayed by theorists and partisans of corporate society.⁶

The shift to capitalist ways of doing things (the concentration of private property, wage labor, turning environmental resources into disposable commodities) came with sharp resistance from many quarters. Historians such as EP Thompson, whose brilliant The Making of the English Working Class charted the early defense of the democratic commons in England,⁷ have documented how people across Europe were dragged kicking and screaming into the factories and poorhouses of early capitalism. Where capitalism in its colonial cloak ran up against the indigenous societies of the Americas or the more structured states of Asia, the response was every bit as fierce. The ‘Indians’ of the Americas proved not only unwilling to give up their way of life and territory but those who survived the colonial onslaught made for a very poor agricultural and industrial workforce. This is where the famous capitalist ‘initiative’ to create the triangular slave trade between Africa, Europe and the plantation economies of the Americas came into play. African workers, torn from their societies, proved a more efficient (if hardly willing) solution to the labor shortage. The slave revolt in Haiti, and its inspirational influence on the African diaspora in the Americas, illustrates the fierce resistance to a life of hard labor in the service of profit.

Communitarian alternatives

The ability of capitalism to recreate itself through destabilizing crises and the uprooting of peoples keeps this sense of discontent forever brewing. Today, many of the ideas about alternatives to capitalism are rooted in pre-capitalist communitarian traditions. One such can be seen in the work of the indigenous Bolivian sociologist Félix Patzi Paco, who champions the tradition of ayllu alluded to above. His is not some narrow backwoods project or anthropological oddity, but rather:

‘an invitation to organize and re-inscribe communal systems all over the world – systems that have been erased and dismantled by the increasing expansion of the capitalist economy, which the European left has been unable to halt. If ayllus and markas are the singular memory and organization of communities in the Andes, then it is the other memories of communal organization around the globe which predate and survived the advent of capitalism which make possible the idea of a communal system today – one not mapped out in advance by any ideology, or any simple return to the past. The Zapatista dictum of the need for “a world in which many worlds fit” springs to mind as we try to imagine a planet of communal systems in a pluri-versal, not uni-versal, world order.’⁸

Not only did burgeoning capitalism meet with fierce resistance but this dissatisfaction has led to a constant parade of ideas and projects to create an alternative. Some, such as socialism and anarchism, have been persistent poles of opposition, while others have taken the form of smaller practical and utopian projects. The modern era, dating back to, say, the times of the French and US revolutions, has seen thousands of such communitarian alternatives come and go. Some have been religious in their inspiration (the Anabaptists and Hutterites, or later the Russian Doukhobors, for example) while others have tended towards the secular. Some were more vertical in their organization, often gathered around a charismatic figure who welded absolute authority over the community. Others were more horizontal, being fiercely democratic. Most aspired to some egalitarian ideal that was a reaction to the polarization of wealth and power that has been an abiding feature of capitalism, including the communities created by Winstanley and the Diggers (the radical wing of the English Revolution), or, later, New Harmony in Pennsylvania or the Oneida Community in upstate New York inspired by John Noyes.⁹ Such attempts to escape the rule of the capitalist market can be seen right through to the 1960s back-to-the-land movement and the sustainable eco-communities that still exist across Europe and the Americas.

Today, alternatives to capitalism continue to survive and thrive in a number of living forms and social movements. The emphasis shifts with the context. Now there is a new language underpinning new ideas – as when the prefix ‘eco’ is added to that old warhorse ‘socialism’. Ecosocialism contains a suspicion of technology and the gospel of progress that was unfamiliar back in the days of state-socialist Five Year Plans or various social-democratic schemes of modernization. There are new movements that advocate doing things slowly – slow food, slow cities, even slow money. Some speak of radical autonomy, in response to a state increasingly divorced from its democratic pretensions. Others aim to rethink the entire enterprise of economic growth and speak of a future based on degrowth. There is also now an attempt to fuse the struggles against poverty and wealth into a common notion of a democratic sufficiency in which all might share. Today’s advocates of an alternative to wasteful capitalism have their roots in past human experiences. They can all find voices of past dissent that still speak to them and offer possibilities of roads not yet taken.

1 Cees Nooteboom, All Soul’s Day, Harcourt Books, New York, 1997.

2 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Penguin Classic, 1981.

3 Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, Routledge, New York, 1989.

4 Pierre Clastres, Society against the State, Zone Books, Cambridge, 1990.

5 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Beacon Press, Boston, 1944.

6 Samuel Bowles and Herb Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism, Basic Books, New York, 1986.

7 EP Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Vintage, New York, 1966.

8 Walter Mignolo, ‘The Communal and the Decolonial’ Turbulence (Ideas for Movement), nin.tl/1a9hwZY

9 Kenneth Rexroth, Communalism: from its origins to the 20th century, Seabury Press, New York, 1974.