The ties that bind

Antiquity

In antiquity the social ties which bound society were personal, expressed through patronage.

Commodity items like slaves were atomised and disposable, not part of society.

Feudalism

Feudalism, a non-slave mode of production, was 'a way of structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour' (Wikipedia).

Reciprocal - and personal - obligations were expressed vertically thus:

"A vassal would swear allegiance and pay homage to his lord in a commendation ceremony. The commendation ceremony was designed to create a lasting bond between a vassal and his lord. Fealty and homage are a key element of feudalism. The ceremony consisted of swearing the Oath of Fealty and the act of homage."

Capitalism

Capitalism, by contrast, needed contractual relationships between free labourers and capitalists as negotiated in the market, and fought against feudalism under the abstract principles of the Rights of Man.

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Capitalism is a less organic form of society. As Marx hyperbolically observed in The Communist Manifesto,

"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”.

It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers."

Capitalism finds organic communities an obstacle to its own ultra-flexible development. The obduracy of the National Union of Mineworkers was sustained by the extraordinary social cohesion of the pit villages. Yet, as Marx noted, human communities are naturally conservative: capitalism propelled human progress precisely through its hostility to the natural human longing for a warm, supportive, harmonious and stable communitarianism.

Once established, capitalist economies sheltered under nation states and were happy to promote a nationalistic patriotism as the foundation of social stability. But post the sixties, globalisation moved into prominance. Economies now straddled the planet, peoples moved in their millions as migrant labour and sometimes just as migrants. Nationalism as an ideology jarred in this new reality. The narrative became 'multiculturalism' - an imagined, global, borderless and thoroughly-superficial 'community' of free and thoroughly-equal citizens.

All those first and second world war types, spouting their loyalty to King and Country, seemed so very anachronistic now.

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How useful is this new neoliberal ideology, branded by its enemies as political correctness?

For running a multiethnic, multicultural economic empire it's essential. But when push comes to shove, the shallowness (indeed fraudulence) of its social glue comes to the fore. If neoliberalism celebrates a transient and transactional individualism against communitarian values deemed non-inclusive and reactionary, it's always going to struggle to marshal mass support when confronting a non-compliant adversary.

Why don't we like Russia? Because they're hard on gays??? Saudi Arabia was never so demonised.

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The ideology of a triumphant capitalism endlessly trumpeted by the Mainstream Media has little to offer the masses outside the bubble .. and ordinary folk, feeling that in their bones, turn elsewhere. The revolutionary bourgeoisie of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the populists of their age, but populism is very suspect today.

The Marxist left believed that just as Marxism had unveiled the mystifications and obfuscations of bourgeois ideology, its vision of socialist freedom, of society working for the many, not the few (to borrow a phrase) would seize the masses, that essential engine of social progress. We know how that worked out.

I have an unappealing prognosis: with economic prospects unpromising, social cohesion unravelling and no easy answers, expect more populism and more crazy politics.

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As I write, we enter another Italian political and economic crisis.