Pre-cpitalist or post-capitalist?

A considerable part of humanity still lives in tribal societies, where extended family allegiances predominate. The rules that govern these social organisations are very different from those based on the divisions of wealth, class and profession that are the basis of industrial societies. A tribesman knows his extended family will support him, as he would them, and will favour him over an outsider. There is an obligation of all for all, a mutual indebtedness. Going back far enough in time, tribal societies were universal, and probably went back to the primeval stages of humanity. But at some point that ageless tradition was broken in some parts of the world, while it continued elsewhere. Tribal members became serfs or slaves, and social relationships were completely transformed.

Serfdom would have resulted from conquest. In the early Bronze Age, exterior forces with superior weapons could easily take control and impose their rule on neolithic agricultural societies. In the early Iron Age, the invading Dorian Greeks who would become Spartans did this to the Messenian helots. The Aztec society was divided into priests, soldiers, merchants and peasant-artisans, but this hierarchy was open to all on merit - though merchants were a sort of hereditary cast - and the perpetual wars were for trade, tribute and sacrificial victims, not for labour. Serfdom resulted from the foreign conquest and occupation of a territory, and the bondage of its native population. Slavery was the fate of a vanquished army. Originally, vanquished armies were put to the sword (as in Joshua 6, 21), though the Aztec kept prisoners for their gory rituals. The early Romans would humiliate their beaten adversaries by having them crawl under a portal made of three spears and representing an animal yoke. However, they soon found it more profitable to make slaves of them. And as the Roman legions expanded their operations, slave labour became preponderant in the republic and later the empire. Rome's Athenian model had also relied on servile labour, but Roman hubris took it to a much higher level.

The Romans destroyed tribal societies and divided humanity into owners and owned, a condition transmitted from parents to children or acquired in the outcome of battles. This heritage evolved over time, as Roman expansion stopped and contracted. Chattel slavery became serfdom from a lack of fresh supplies, labour was chained to the soil and could no longer be bought and sold, and the Germanic invasions installed feudal vassalage. The Saxons, Francs, Vandals, Goths, etc. soon abandoned their tribal cultures to become owners of land and people, while continuing to fight one another for supremacy. Old and new habits shaped the European Middle Ages and continued the divisions of ownership, passing from the property of land and people to that of money as the source of power, the power of a new ruling class, the merchants, bankers and industrialists.

Slavery and serfdom transformed tribal societies into ones based on class. People were no longer born as members of a clan or tribe, but as members of a social category, separated from the others by unpassable barriers. The social hierarchy was no longer a community. Territorial expansion by a tribe is hindered by its neighbours. They can be allies or enemies, but cannot be incorporated as their parentage is different. Societies structured by class do not have this handicap and can expand indefinitely. Conquered nations are obliged to adapt to the new rules of social stratification based on ownership. There are the owners and those who are owned, and later those who own just their muscles and minds and must sell them as best they can to go on living. Tribal societies are proto-feudal, with the mutual obligations of vassalage, but without the serfs. Their territories are held in common and are unalienable. Only the usage is private. Rosa Luxemburg has described the difficulties confronting the colonial powers in their attempted conversions of tribal to class based societies, Britain in India and France in Algeria (1). Neither was successful and both colonised nations still have large tribal regions long after their independences in 1947 and 1962 respectively.

Tribal common property and capitalist class property produce two very different worlds. They are incompatible, and the second tries to destroy the first, pretexting modernity and “progress”. But there is resistance, and that modernity is increasingly perceived as a source of anarchy and global havoc. Tribalism may have an unexpected tailwind due to capitalism's blatant failure and its path to annihilation of the planet's ecosystem. Capital's accumulation in private hands and its obsessive quest for profit is completely alienated from the common good. That attitude has had fatal consequences for too many in the past, and the number of victims is growing faster than ever. With tradition and religion, the Afghan tribes have resisted and obliged to leave a coalition of at least half the world's arms dealers, and the onslaughts of capitalist corruption were restricted to cities and army bases. Capitalism's seemingly irresistible ethnocidal and sometimes genocidal conquest has lost its momentum and is on a declining path. And a neo-tribalism may well rise up from the ashes of empire.

1. A must read on the subject.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/ch27.htm