The Disintegration of Primitive Society and the Evolution of Class Society

The Disintegration of Primitive Society and the Evolution of Class Society

From Primitive Society to Slave Society

Primitive society was the earliest stage of human social development, and also the lowest stage. If primitive society can be compared to the childhood of humanity, this childhood lasted for two to three million years, with most of this time spent in the Paleolithic era. At that time, people mainly lived by gathering natural food. About ten thousand years ago, humanity entered the Neolithic era, and primitive animal husbandry and agriculture began to emerge. People transformed from food gatherers to producers. Those regions that benefited from pastoral farming and allowed humans to settle down mostly became the cradles of human civilization.

The low productivity of primitive society forced people to work together, collectively owning the means of production, and forming equal and mutually supportive relationships in production, with labor products being distributed evenly. This was a characteristic of the production relations in primitive society.

In primitive society, clans formed based on blood relations were the basic units of communal life for primitive people. Under the clan system, people managed collective affairs through clan councils, where all major decisions were discussed and decided by all adult members of the clan. Towards the end of primitive society, some closely related clans formed tribes, and some tribes united to form tribal alliances.

In the late stage of primitive society, the improvement of production tools greatly promoted the development of productivity. With the development of productivity, individual labor gradually became prevalent. The collective labor, which was originally carried out by the entire ethnic group, was gradually replaced by individual labor by families, and the means of production correspondingly shifted from clan public ownership to family private ownership. The earliest private property of families was mainly production tools and livestock, and later, land also became private property, marking the establishment of private ownership. The intensification of wealth disparities caused the status of clan members to become increasingly unequal, leading to the gradual disintegration of the long-standing primitive society.

As primitive society disintegrated, two groups with different statuses emerged—the slave-owning class and the slave class. The former occupied the position of exploiters, while the latter were in the position of the exploited. A class is a group that holds different positions in certain production relations.

The characteristics of slave-based production relations are that slave owners owned the means of production and completely owned the slaves; slaves had no personal freedom and were forced to work under the control of slave owners; all products of slave labor were owned and controlled by the slave owners, who only provided slaves with the minimum living necessities.

The slave-owning class and the slave class were the first two opposing classes formed in human society. The contradiction between the slave class and the slave-owning class was the main contradiction in slave society. The cruel exploitation and oppression by slave owners inevitably led to slave resistance. In order to protect their class interests, slave owners established violent institutions such as armies, courts, and prisons. Thus, the earliest state in human history—the slave state—was born. The state is the product of irreconcilable class contradictions and a tool for class rule.

After slave society replaced primitive society, the widespread use of metal tools, the emergence of cities, the invention and application of writing, and the division of mental and physical labor all promoted the development of productivity, allowing humanity to break free from a state of savagery and enter the threshold of civilization. This was a significant historical progress.

From Feudal Society to Capitalist Society

In the later stages of slave society, as productivity developed to a new level, feudal production relations emerged.

The characteristics of feudal production relations are that landlords owned most of the land and, through collecting rent and other means, took most of the labor products from the peasants. Compared to slaves, peasants had some personal freedom, had their own labor tools, and even a small amount of land. After paying rent, they could keep some labor products for themselves. This allowed peasants to work more autonomously and increased their productivity, which promoted the development of social production. When the slave system gradually became an obstacle to further development of productivity, it was replaced by feudalism, which was an inevitable result of productivity development.

In feudal society, feudal land ownership was the basis for the landlord class to exploit peasants. The landlord class, through their ownership of the land, forced peasants to depend on and submit to their enslavement. Rent collection was the main way landlords exploited peasants. Rent included labor rent, rent in kind, and money rent. Additionally, the landlord class exploited peasants through usury, heavy taxes, and forced labor.

The distinctive features of the feudal state were monarchical absolutism and a strict social hierarchy. To maintain the rule of the feudal state, the landlord class also spread feudal superstitions, propagated feudal morals, and promoted the concept of the "divine right of kings," suppressing the thoughts of the laboring people.

In feudal society, the peasant class and the landlord class were the two basic classes, and the contradiction between these two classes was the main contradiction in feudal society. Faced with the economic exploitation and political oppression of the landlord class, the peasant class's resistance never ceased. These struggles often developed from small-scale anti-rent and anti-tax movements into large-scale peasant uprisings or peasant wars.

In the late feudal society, as social productivity and the commodity economy developed, capitalist production relations began to emerge within the feudal society.

The characteristics of capitalist production relations are that capitalists own all the means of production, and workers, who have lost the means of production, are forced to sell their labor power and work for capitalists, becoming wage laborers. Capitalists, in the production process, appropriate the surplus value created by workers.

The establishment of capitalist production relations requires two basic conditions: first, a large number of people who have lost their means of production, have personal freedom, and can freely sell their labor power; second, a large amount of money necessary to open capitalist enterprises, used as capital. Historically, the Western bourgeoisie relied on violence and plunder to form these two conditions. The formation of capitalist society was not an idyllic process, but one filled with aggression, conquest, plunder, slaughter, and enslavement. This process is "written into the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire." Marx said, "Capital comes into the world dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt."

The development of capitalist production showed the emerging bourgeoisie’s significant economic advantages. However, the existence of the feudal system made it difficult for the emerging bourgeoisie to fully exploit these advantages, and only by overthrowing the feudal regime could the obstacles to capitalist development be cleared. Thus, the emerging bourgeoisie and their thinkers put forward slogans such as "liberty, equality, fraternity" and used the power of the working people to launch revolutions to seize power from the feudal landlord class. The victory of the bourgeois revolutions marked the beginning of capitalist society, and human society entered a new historical stage.

The establishment of the capitalist system and the occurrence and completion of the industrial revolution brought about a significant leap in the productive forces of capitalist society, promoting the liberation of human thought and bringing the development of science, education, and culture to unprecedented heights.

When capitalism develops to a certain stage, it will inevitably experience economic crises characterized by overproduction. Overproduction is relative overproduction, meaning that relative to the demand that people can afford, the commodities produced by society appear excessive, not that there is an absolute excess relative to people's actual needs. Economic crises are an incurable chronic disease of capitalism.

The main manifestations of capitalist economic crises are: large quantities of commodities cannot be sold, large quantities of production materials are idle, a large number of production enterprises and banks go bankrupt, large numbers of workers are unemployed, production rapidly declines, credit relationships are destroyed, and the entire social life falls into chaos.

The direct causes of capitalist economic crises are the contradiction between the tendency for production to expand indefinitely and the relatively shrinking demand that people can afford, and the contradiction between the organization within individual enterprises and the anarchic state of social production as a whole. When these contradictions become acute, the social production structure becomes severely unbalanced; on the one hand, social production grows on a large scale, while on the other hand, the working class becomes increasingly impoverished due to capitalist exploitation, leading to a severe overproduction of social goods.

The root cause of the incurability of economic crises lies in the contradiction between the socialization of production and the capitalist private ownership of the means of production. This is the fundamental contradiction of capitalist society.

The fundamental contradiction of capitalist society is expressed in class relations as the opposition between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Capitalists, owning the means of production and hiring workers for production, constantly increase their exploitation of workers in pursuit of maximizing their own profits; the vast majority of workers, having no means of production, are economically exploited and politically oppressed, becoming the most suffering class. As social productivity develops, the bourgeoisie, in order to maintain its rule, adopts some measures to ease class contradictions, but these measures neither change nor can change the capitalist private ownership and its exploitative relationships.

The fundamental contradiction of capitalism is the contradiction between the development of productive forces and the capitalist production relations, which is the source of all conflicts and contradictions in capitalist society. The development of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism runs through the entire history of capitalist society and determines its fate. The higher the degree of socialization of production, the more concentrated capital, means of production, and labor products become in the hands of a few capitalists, making the fundamental contradiction of capitalist society increasingly sharp and inevitable. Ultimately, capitalism will be replaced by socialism, though this is a long process, it is the inevitable trend of historical development.