The Emergence and Development of Division of Labor, Money, Private Property, Empire, and Male Domination in Ancient and Modern Civilizations

Abstract

Today we experience the financial markets as the dominant force of our destructive civilization. However, they are but the climax of a development starting nearly three thousand years ago. The key issue is the development of larger societies with growing division of labor and exchange of goods that use money connected with the concept of private property. Division of labor as such existed much earlier. But the question is how it is socially coordinated. Social coordination is necessary in order to organize the reproduction of life within a given community through the production and distribution of goods to satisfy people’s basic needs. In their book on the subject, Franz Hinkelammert and Henry M. Mora distinguish five types of social coordination of labor, characteristic of particular periods of history but overlapping.¹ Building on this proposal we suggest distinguishing among the following phases of development:

• 1. Tribal society (before 3000 BCE), including agricultural communities. Here all different types of labor are interconnected in small communities.

• 2. Archaic societies before the introduction of money and private property (around 3000 to eighth century BCE). A new phenomenon emerges: the cities, superimposing themselves on agrarian communities and subjugating tribes in order to extract the surplus of their labor. Even the first empires appear, mostly connected to the creation of hydraulic systems with giant work forces for the irrigation of agriculture.²

• 3. Societies with early money-property economies (eighth century BCE to fourth century CE). In this period money, charging interest, and private property spread widely in the Mediterranean, the Ancient Near East, and the Far East, increasingly coordinating the division of labor through markets and undermining solidarity structures. The result was landless and over-indebted people, thus reinforcing the split between elites and the impoverished groups.

• 4. Slave labor and feudal serf labor societies (around 500 BCE to thirteenth century CE). The towns and landlords dominate the agricultural production of latifundia, using debt mechanisms for the enlargement of the estates and a labor force of debt slaves.

• 5. Early capitalism completes the social coordination of the division of labor through markets in a systematic form, subordinating the countryside to the dominance of the cities.

• 6. Industrial capitalism, with its factory production, is characterized by a growing specialization within the work process. Workers are not expected to create a complete product in order to realize a higher profit for the capital owner.

• 7. The climax of this period is today’s financial capitalism, which subjects the whole production process, scientific and technological development, policy making, and the satisfaction of basic needs by life-sustaining goods to one goal: the maximization of financial profits.