9. Barbarism and Civilisation¶
Core Argument¶
At the upper stage of barbarism, the gentile constitution reached its fullest expression among American Indians, organising tribes into gentes, phratries, and confederacies. This system knew no rulers or ruled, no distinction between rights and duties; division of labour was purely primitive, between sexes only, with communal housekeeping and common property. The first great social division of labour—the separation of pastoral tribes—made regular exchange possible and turned cattle into a money commodity. This division brought slavery in its train, creating the first class cleavage into masters and slaves. The man’s ownership of herds overturned the previous domestic relation, establishing male supremacy and overthrowing mother right.
The second great division of labour separated handicraft from agriculture at the upper stage of barbarism, producing commodity production and commerce. Iron tools enabled large-scale tillage and forest clearance; slavery became essential to the social system. Distinctions of rich and poor appeared beside those of freemen and slaves. The single family became the economic unit. War became a regular industry for plunder, and the military leader’s position became hereditary, laying the foundation for hereditary monarchy and nobility. The gentile constitution changed from an organisation for free self-ordering into one for domination and oppression.
Civilisation then added a third division of labour, creating the merchant class, which captured direction of production without participating in it. Metallic money and minted coin emerged as new instruments for dominating producers, along with interest and usury. Private ownership of land became fully alienable, allowing land to become a commodity that could be sold and pledged; mortgages appeared almost immediately. The concentration of wealth in a small class accelerated, alongside increasing impoverishment of the masses and a growing slave population whose forced labour formed the basis of society. The gentile constitution became helpless against these new forces: territories now contained heterogeneous populations from varied gentes and tribes, including slaves and aliens; settled conditions were disrupted by trade, occupation changes, and land ownership shifts. New needs and interests arose from the division of labour and town-country opposition, requiring organs formed outside and in opposition to the gentile order. Class conflict between rich and poor, usurers and debtors, appeared within every gentile body. The gentile constitution, which knew no internal contradictions and possessed only public opinion as coercion, was shattered by the division of labour and class cleavage. It was replaced by the state.
Civilisation begins with slavery, the first great division of society into exploiting and exploited classes, succeeded by serfdom and wage labour. Its economic foundations include metal money, money capital, usury, a merchant class, private land ownership with mortgages, and slave labour as the dominant production mode. Monogamy, male domination, and the single family as the economic unit become the family form. The state is always the instrument of the ruling class for holding down the oppressed. Permanent town-country opposition and wills, allowing property disposal after death, are also characteristic. Civilisation achieved what gentile society could not, but only by unleashing base instincts; sheer greed for individual wealth was its sole driving spirit. Since it rests on class exploitation, every productive advance worsens the oppressed majority’s position; every emancipation of one class oppresses another. Civilisation forces the ruling class to cloak these evils with conventional hypocrisy, claiming exploitation benefits the exploited. Morgan’s judgement concludes that property has become an unmanageable power, but human intelligence will master it; society’s interests are paramount, and a higher plane—democracy, brotherhood, equality, universal education—will revive the liberty, equality, and fraternity of the ancient gentes.