Capital vs. community
Comparing Harari and Marx on the Industrial Revolution
[Painting by
]Part 2.4 in my critique of Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
Communities and families aren’t what they used to be.
Whether you categorize the last several hundred years more in terms of capitalism or modernity, one thing that is undeniable about this period is that there has been an unprecedented level of globalization and of breakdown of communities and relatively traditional family structures. Mass migrations from countries to cities; women and children entering the workforce, etc. Whether you think these transformations are primarily a result of economic developments or changing values, the transformation is obvious and ongoing.
So, from the “big history,” “30,000 feet” perspective in Sapiens, how does Harari account for such changes? He does point to economic factors; however, he manages to avoid discussing these factors in the context of capitalism, and his explanations are strange.
“Money has always tried to break through these barriers”
First, Harari briefly touches on this topic of family and community at the end of his chapter on money.
In this instance, describing the “darker side” of money, Harari explains that money inherently seeks to breakdown boundaries drawn by families and communities: “Money has always tried to break through these barriers, like water seeping through cracks in a dam.”[1]
In describing the traditional bases for communities and families, Harari places emphasis on belief in certain values:
Human communities and families have always been based on belief in ‘priceless’ things, such as honour, loyalty, morality and love. These things lie outside the domain of the market, and they shouldn’t be bought or sold for money. Even if the market offers a good price, certain things just aren’t done.
Rather than things like love, affection, and intimacy (or things like interdependency), Harari emphasizes things like belief in love as being the fundamental bond of social relations.
However, he explains that money works to undermine these values at every chance:
Money has always tried to break through these barriers, like water seeping through cracks in a dam. Parents have been reduced to selling some of their children into slavery in order to buy food for the others. Devout Christians have murdered, stolen and cheated – and later used their spoils to buy forgiveness from the church. Ambitious knights auctioned their allegiance to the highest bidder, while securing the loyalty of their own followers by cash payments. Tribal lands were sold to foreigners from the other side of the world in order to purchase an entry ticket into the global economy.[2]
Harari strangely puts agency on the part of money, and he describes the money-driven violations of family and community code almost entirely without context (“in order to buy food for the others;” “in order to purchase an entry ticket into the global economy”). As if, absent any economic desperation, parents would be tempted by the very existence of money to sell their children into slavery. If you provide the context of the dire situations in which such community/family undermining decisions were made, then there’s no need for attributing a community/family-undermining incentive to money itself.
Attributing some agency on the part of money might make sense in the context of capitalism, that is, in a society organized around capital, around a particular use of money—which is of course very different from feudalism, for example, where society is not organized around money but rather around a monarch.
Marx himself often describes capital as a thing essentially ruling over society, where the laws of capitalist production guide the rationale of individual capitalists. However, Marx makes clear that capital is fundamentally social (“capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, mediated through things”[4]); whereas Harari ascribes agency to money in general, as well as a timeless ambition to destroy families and communities. (As strange as it is, this way of thinking—ascribing agency to things humans produce—is fairly common is Sapiens; for example, in his chapter on domestication, Harari argues that plants actually domesticated humans, rather than the other way around: “Wheat did it by manipulating the human species to its advantage”[5]).
“[A]n offer that could not be refused”
Harari understands the destruction of traditional families and communities as a result of the Industrial Revolution, the state and the market; however, he doesn’t contextualize these factors as part of the transition to capitalism.
To be sure, he sometimes alludes to that transition, for example, by using terms like peasantry and urban proletariat, but his explanation lacks any analysis of capitalism.
Much of what Harari has to say about the Industrial Revolution is pretty standard and agreeable. However, he leaves capitalist production off the hook, ultimately blaming the state and the market for overcoming all those traditional social bonds via the allure of individualism: “an offer that could not be refused. ‘Become individuals,’ they said.”
Harari associates the Industrial Revolution, rightly so, with various upheavals in society. In addition to urbanization, the emergence of the industrial proletariat and the withering of the peasantry, Harari includes “the most momentous social revolution that ever befell humankind: the collapse of the family and the local community and their replacement by the state and the market.”
The Industrial Revolution […] managed within little more than two centuries to break these building blocks [of families and communities] into atoms. Most of the traditional functions of families and communities were handed over to states and markets.[6]
Despite briefly describing the Industrial Revolution as having broken families and communities “into atoms,” what Harari ultimately argues is that the Industrial Revolution strengthened the state and the market, and that the state and the market then broke down barriers defined by families and communities:
The Industrial Revolution gave the market immense new powers, provided the state with new means of communication and transportation, and placed at the government’s disposal an army of clerks, teachers, policemen and social workers. At first the market and the state discovered their path blocked by traditional families and communities who had little love for outside intervention. Parents and community elders were reluctant to let the younger generation be indoctrinated by nationalist education systems, conscripted into armies or turned into a rootless urban proletariat.[7]
Again, mostly the passage strikes me as pretty standard and unproblematic, other than what is missing. The Industrial Revolution was not just an isolated historical phenomenon which can be adequately understood in and of itself; all of these processes—urbanization, proletarianization, the rise of the new form of state and market; major technical advances in the forces of production—are part of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
Urbanization and proletarianization tied to the Industrial Revolution where themselves fundamentally community-destroying processes, often enabled by force—through expropriations and enclosures of land and subsequently through barbaric legislation against “idling” among those whose previous ways of life had been destroyed.[8]
To this day, when jobs become scarce or housing becomes too expensive, for example, the incentive to move to another city, state or country is enough to drive demographic shifts. When companies move their manufacturing to another state or country where labor organization and regulation is less developed, the communities left behind are devasted.
But the destruction of community runs even deeper in capitalist production, through not only a highly alienated workforce often adhering to a rigid division of labor but also by capitalism’s need to expand its grasp, to take root everywhere, to lengthen the working day as much as possible.
Marx explains how the demands of surplus-value, unchecked by regulation, drove the extension of the working day such that “[e]very boundary set by morality and nature, age and sex, day and night, was broken down,” until the working class developed a long-fought movement of resistance to limit the working day:
After capital had taken centuries to extend the working day to its normal maximum limit, and then beyond this to the limit of the natural day of 12 hours, there followed, with the birth of large-scale industry in the last third of the 18th Century, an avalanche of violent and unmeasured encroachments. Every boundary set by morality and nature, age and sex, day and night, was broken down. Even the ideas of day and night, which in the old statutes were of peasant simplicity, became so confused that an English judge, as late as 1860, needed the penetration of an interpreter of the Talmud to explain “judicially” what was day and what was night. Capital was celebrating its orgies.
As soon as the working class, stunned at first by the noise and turmoil of the new system of production, had recovered its senses to some extent, it began to offer resistance, first of all in England, the native land of large-scale industry.[9]
The context of capitalism is important, not the least because the factors undermining families and communities are ongoing to this day, despite that the Industrial Revolution ended almost two centuries ago, and that’s because such family- and community-undermining factors run through the heart of the processes by which capitalism functions.
So, how does Harari ultimately understand the way in which states and markets came to undermine families and communities? Through an alluring offer of individualism:
The state and the market approached people with an offer that could not be refused. ‘Become individuals,’ they said. ‘Marry whomever you desire, without asking permission from your parents. Take up whatever job suits you, even if community elders frown. Live wherever you wish, even if you cannot make it every week to the family dinner. You are no longer dependent on your family or your community. We, the state and the market, will take care of you instead. We will provide food, shelter, education, health, welfare and employment. We will provide pensions, insurance and protection.’[10]
In Harari’s story, the destruction of traditional families and communities occurred essentially under non-coercive conditions, through the consent of people who decided to take the leap to become individuals. It’s a more pleasant story than the one Marx tells, but is it as coherent or adequate?
It presumes peasants always voluntarily opted for radically transforming their lives, on the basis primarily of ideas, ignoring the mass expropriations and enclosures of land which helped kickstart capitalism in England.
Notes
[1]. Harari, Sapiens (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 186.
[2]. Ibid.
[3]. Ibid.
[4]. Marx, Capital: Vol. One (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 932.
[5]. Harari, 80.
[6]. Ibid, 355-6.
[7]. Ibid, 358-9.
[8]. Marx, 896-7.
[9]. Ibid, 389-90.
[10]. Harari, 359.
Great inputs, Angel, elaborating on these highly relevant contemporary examples! It's far too common to believe that migration waves are largely driven by the something like the "American dream" drawing people in, rather than people fleeing real world problems in their home countries, like poverty or war (which very often is inseparable from dynamics of the global economy and policies implemented by the U.S.).