REVOLUTIONS IN ANTIQUITY AND THE MIDDLE AGES.
Any definite conclusion as to whether revolution is a necessity or not can be drawn only from an investigation of the facts of social development, and not through analogies with natural science. It is only necessary to glance at these earlier stages of development in order to see that social revolution, in the narrow sense in which we are here using it, is no necessary accompaniment of social development. There was a social development and a very far-reaching one before the rise of class antagonisms and political power. In these stages the conquest of political power by an oppressed class, and consequently a social revolution, was as a matter of course impossible.
Even after class antagonisms and political power have arisen it is a long time before we find, either in antiquity or the Middle Ages, anything which corresponds to our idea of revolution. We find plenty of examples of bitter class struggles, civil wars and political catastrophies, but none of these brought about a fundamental and permanent renovation of the conditions of property and therewith a new social form.
To my mind the reasons for this are as follows: In antiquity and also in the Middle Ages the center of gravity of the economic and also of the political life lay in the community. Each community was sufficient in itself in all essential points and was only attached to the exterior world through loose bands. The great states were only conglomerates of communities which were held together only through either a dynasty or through another ruling and exploiting community. Each community had its own special economic development corresponding to its own peculiar characteristics and corresponding to these also its special class struggles. The political revolutions also at that time were chiefly only communal revolutions. It was as a matter of course impossible to transform the whole social life of a great territory by a political revolution.
The smaller the number of individuals in a social movement the less there is of a real social movement; the less there is of the universal and law creating, and the more the personal and the accidental dominate. This increased the diversity of the class struggles in the different communities. Because in the class struggle no movement of the masses could appear, because the general was concealed in the accidental and the personal, there could be no deep recognition of social causes and the goals of class movements. However great the philosophy created by the Greeks, the idea of a scientific national economy was foreign to them. Aristotle supplies only outlines of such a system. The Greeks and Romans on the economic field produced only practical instructions for domestic economy, or for agricultural industries, such as those composed by Xenophon and Varro.
While the deeper social causes that gave rise to the condition of individual classes remained concealed and were veiled by the acts of individual persons and local peculiarities, it was not to be wondered at that the oppressed classes also, as soon as they had conquered political power, used it first of all to get rid of individuals and local peculiarities and not to establish a new social order.
The most important obstacle in the road to any revolutionary movements at this time was the slowness of economic development. This proceeded imperceptibly. Peasants and artisans worked as their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had been accustomed to work. The ancient, the customary, was the only good and perfect thing. Even when one sought to create something new, he endeavored to prove to others that it was really a return to some forgotten tradition. Technical progress did not in itself compel new forms of property for it consisted only in increasing social division of labor, in the division of one trade into many. But, in each of the new trades, hand work was still fundamental, the means of production were insignificant, and the decisive element was manual skill. To be sure, in the last years of antiquity, we find beside the peasants and the artisans great businesses (even industrial establishments), but these were operated by slaves who were considered as aliens outside of the community life. These industries produced only luxuries and could develop no special economic strength, except temporarily in times of great wars which weakened agriculture and made slave material cheap. A high economic form and a new social ideal cannot arise upon a slave economy.
The single form of capital which was developed in antiquity and the Middle Ages was usury and commercial capital. Both of these may, at times, bring about rapid economic changes. But commercial capital could only further the division of the old trades into countless new ones and the advance of the great industry dependent on slave labor. Usurious capital operated simply to stunt existing forms of production without creating new ones. The struggle against usurious capital and against the great agricultural industries which were operated by slaves led to occasional political struggles very similar to the social revolutions of our time. But the goal of these was always only the restoration of an earlier condition and not a social renovation. Such was the case in the liquidation of debts brought about for the Greek peasants, by Solon, and in the movements of the Roman peasants and proletarians from which the Gracchi receive their name. To all of these causes—slowness of economic development, lack of recognition of deeper social relations, division of political life into countless differing communities, must be added the fact that in classical antiquity and many times also in the Middle Ages, the means for the suppression of a rising class were relatively insignificant. There were no bureaucracies, or at least never where there was the most active political life, and where the class struggle was most fiercely waged. In the Roman world, for example, bureaucracy was first developed under the empire. The internal relations of communities as well as their commerce with each other were simple, easy to comprehend and presupposed no expert knowledge. The governing classes could easily secure the necessary governing officials out of their own number, and this is all the more true in that at that time the governing class was also accustomed to engage in artistic, philosophic and political activity. The ruling class did not simply reign, it also governed.
On the other side the mass of the people were not wholly defenceless. It was in just the golden age of classical antiquity that the militia system was the rule, under which every citizen was armed. Under those conditions a very slight alteration in the balance of power of classes was sufficient to bring a new class into control. Class antagonisms could not well reach such a height that the idea of a complete transformation of all existing institutions could become firmly rooted in the minds of an oppressed class, and, moreover, in these oppressed classes, stubborn clinging to all privileges was the rule. As has already been noted this operated to confine political revolution almost wholly to the abolition of individual abuses and the removal of individual persons. This condition also assisted in the avoidance through compromise of all forms of revolution.
Among the great nations of modern times England is the one which most resembles the Middle Ages, not economically, but in its political form. Militarism and bureaucracy are there the least developed. It still possesses an aristocracy that not only reigns but governs. Corresponding to this, England is the great modern nation in which the efforts of the oppressed classes are mainly confined to the removal of particular abuses instead of being directed against the whole social system. It is also the State in which the practice of protection against revolution through compromise is farthest developed.
If the universal armament of the people did not encourage great social revolutions, it did make it much easier for armed conflict between the classes to arise at the slightest opportunity. There is no lack of violent uprisings and civil wars in antiquity and the Middle Ages. The ferocity with which these were fought was often so great as to lead to the expulsion, expropriation and oftentimes to the extermination of the conquered. Those who consider violence as a sign of social revolution will find plenty of such revolutions in earlier ages. But those who conceive social revolution as the conquest of political power by a previously subservient class and the transformation of the juridical and political superstructure of society, particularly in the property relations, will find no social revolution there. Social development proceeded piece-meal, step by step, not through single great catastrophies but in countless little broken-up, apparently disconnected, often interrupted, ever renewing, mostly unconscious movements. The great social transformation of the times we are considering, the disapperance of slavery in Europe, came about so imperceptibly that the contemporaries of this movement took no notice of it, and one is to-day compelled to reconstruct it through hypotheses.
SOCIAL REVOLUTION UNDER CAPITALISM.
Things took on a wholly different aspect as soon as the capitalist method of production was developed. It would lead us too far and would be only to repeat things well known if j I were here to go into the mechanism of capitalism and its consequences. Suffice it to say that the capitalist method of production created the modern State, made en end to the political independence of communities and at the same time their economic independence ceased, each became part of a whole, and lost its special