252 MARXISM TODAY, AUGUSI 1962

A Soviet Textbook
Most Western textbooks on international law look
to the past and refuse to face up to the really impor-
tant issues of today. It is most revealing that in many
large volumes on the subject no mention is made at
all of the Soviet Union or its attitude to international
law.
It is a great pleasure, therefore, to see the new
English edition of International Law, a textbook for
use in law schools, published by the Soviet Academy
of Sciences and translated by Dennis Ogden.
The book naturally deals with many matters of
detail from Russian experiences and history, and that
is useful in itself.
More important for the English reader, however,
is the Marxist approach to the subject the authors
reveal.
After dealing with the conception and sources of
international law and its relationship to national
law, the book probes such subjects as the history of
international law, population, territory, treaties,
international organisations, peaceful settlement of
disputes, and the laws and customs of war.
Any suggestion that war has become so barbarous
that the rules of international law are absolete must
be resisted.
The Soviet Union continually shows that such
laws exist and can be vindicated and extended. As a
result of this, and the world peace movement, a
world opinion is ripening in which they can be made
stronger, more positive and more effective.
They must be seen as helping to maintain inter-
national peace and security, and this book fills a
useful gap in the literature on international law
available in this country.
Discussion contributions on:
Stages of Social Devel opment
B. R. Mann
P
ART of the quality of greatness which dis-
tinguished the founders of historical material-
ism was their eagerness constantly to improve
their knowledge of precise historical facts, to study
them in the closest possible detail, to gain a deeper
insight into the complexity of social phenomena,
always to ascend from the particular to the
general and positively to discourage any tendency
to draw conclusions from general principles,
unsupported by detailed evidence. They would
naturally expect their modern followers not to
cling to barren formulae, but to grasp hold of all
the wealth of new knowledge gained since their
deaths by archaeological, historical and anthro-
pological research with the same eagerness as they
themselves would have done.
Among the most significant extensions of
our knowledge is the expansion of the time-
span of human existence. When Marx and
Engels first examined the development of societies
it was generally held that this span exceeded the
biblical 4,000 years but little, three-quarters of it
being taken up by the period of civihsation
believed to centre around the Mediterranean. Of
the depths of history of Asiatic and African civili-
sations virtually nothing was known reliably.
Archaeological excavation had not even begun.
Boucher de Perthes' discovery of the antiquity of
man-made tools did not find academic recognition
until 1859, and even an encyclopaedia of 1906 still
describes him as a "French author and archaeolo-
gist who advocated extreme views on the antiquity
of man"!
By the time Morgan published Ancient Society
the human lifespan already appeared much longer,
around 100,000 years, 5,000 years, more or less,
being attributed to civilisation. Today we must at
least double the latter figure and allow a million
years or two for the entire period of human exist-
ence. It would be quite futile to maintain that such
a drastic revision of our timescale can have no
influence on our conclusions. In particular, it
means that the periods designated "savagery" and
"barbarism" by Morgan have receded into an
extremely remote past and can have little or no
bearing on any living nation.
Some contributors to this discussion have been
worried over the length of time during which
feudalism is now thought by many to have pre-
vailed in most parts of the world except northern
Europe. In view of the great expansion of the total
period of human existence there is, however, no
reason to see anything very remarkable in this;
if in Asia or Africa feudalism has existed for
several thousand years, this will represent an even
more minute fraction of the total lifespan of
humanity than the millennium or so assigned to it
in Europe by 19th century scholars.
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MARXISM lODAY, AUGUST 1962
253
Marx already indicated in Capital (vol. 1, p.
325), though very briefly, that
"Peasant agriculture on a small scale, and the
carrying on of independent handicrafts, which
together form the basis of the feudal mode of pro-
duction, and after its dissolution continue side by
side with the capitalist mode, also form the economic
foundation of the classical communities at their
best, after the primitive form of ownership of land
in common had disappeared, and before slavery had
seized production in earnest."
If we follow up this thought of Marx's in the
light of modern knowledge, the slave societies of
Greece and Rome appear more and more as
exceptional excrescences, a temporary complica-
tion and distortion of basically feudal relations
due to specific historical conditions.
Engels' observation that slavery accompanies
all other forms of exploitation (with, of course,
varying degrees of attenuation) will then be seen
as very significant for the analysis of historical
processes. Today it is abundantly clear that
capitalism does not exclude slavery: not only have
we seen it practised in its most revolting form in
Hitler Germany, in essence it is the basis of the
colonial system, and, in the period of rising
capitalism, "the turning of Africa into a warren
for the commercial hunting of blackskins" was
one of the "chief momenta of primitive accumula-
tion" (Capital, vol. 1, p. 775).
Slavery in Africa
These considerations will be found of most par-
ticular importance for the destruction of the
imperialist myth of "primitive" Africa which
stands so prominently in the way of our recogni-
tion of the fundamental significance of the African
question for the world advance to socialism. I
would like to pay tribute here to those writers on
African subjects who have helped to destroy part
of that myth. In particular, Basil Davidson in his
latest book Mother Africa has effectively disposed
of the illusion that the slave trade was conducted
exclusively by white men who pounced on the
unsuspecting "savages" to take them away. In
fact, as the sources clearly reveal (e.g. the failure
of Master lohn Hawkins to make a business out
of this sort of proceedings), the slaves had to be
purchased by way of regular commerce from the
African merchants. Slave raiding by whites on the
continent itself was the rare exception, not the
rule, and slaves procured in this way, being "con-
traband", were difficult to dispose of.
This throws quite a difl^erent light on the state
of development of African society and the sig-
nificance of slavery in Africa at different times.
For the ancient period, all we can say with cer-
tainty is that slaves were among the exports from
tropical Africa both overland and overseas some
2,000 to 3,000 years ago. We do not know how
intermittent the trade was, or how deeply it pene-
trated into the interior in that distant past, much
less have we any basis for asserting that there
existed a full-blown sysiciu of slave society com-
parable to Greece or Rome.
Although there are indications that the slave
trade continued alongside the trade in commodi-
ties into the early capitalist era, it seems only in
the latter period, when the demand for slaves for
the capitalist plantations of America became
insistent, that slaves were exported in truly vast
numbers. This could not but affect social and
economic conditions in Africa. From the 17th
century onward our sources show that slaves
formed at all events a considerable proportion of
the labour forces, in handicrafts as well as in
agriculture, but mainly in porterage. In some
African states all subjects of a king were auto-
matically regarded as his slaves. Payment of
tribute was often demanded in the form of slaves.
The "production" of slaves for sale became a
regular industry and put a .sharp brake on the
development of home industries in favour of over-
seas imports.
Nevertheless, we will seek in vain here for any
but superficial parallels with ancient Greece or
Rome. The crucial point is that the trade was
organised for the capitalist world market, that, to
quote Marx again, it "signalled the rosy dawn of
the era of capitalist production". Failure to recog-
nise this has been responsible for a great deal of
misconception about Africa, and it is high time
that we approach the study of this problem in the
spirit of Marx, and resist attempts to reduce
Marxism to a dead letter.
From Feudalism to Capitalism
Eric Hobsbawm
O
F the various stages of historical develop-
ment listed by Marx in the Preface to The
Critique of Political Economy the
"Asiatic, ancient, the feudal and the modern
bourgeois" modes of production, the feudal and
the capitalist have been accepted without serious
question, while the existence, or the universality
of the other two has been queried or denied.
On the other hand the problem of the transi-
tion from feudalism to capitalism has probably
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