Empire of barbarism

"A new age of barbarism is upon us." These were the opening words of an editorial in the September 20, 2004, issue of Business Week clearly designed to stoke the flames of anti-terrorist hysteria. Pointing to the murder of schoolchildren in Russia, women and children killed on buses in Israel, the beheading of American, Turkish, and Nepalese workers in Iraq, and the killing of hundreds on a Spanish commuter train and hundreds more in Bali, Business Week declared: "America, Europe, Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, and governments everywhere are under attack by Islamic extremists. These terrorists have but one demand--the destruction of modern secular society." Western civilization was portrayed as standing in opposition to the barbarians, who desire to destroy what is assumed to be the pinnacle of social evolution.

Altogether absent from this establishment view is the predatory role played by U.S. and European imperialism. It is true that we are living in a "new age of barbarism." However this has its roots not in religious fundamentalism but in what Marx saw as the barbarism accompanying bourgeois civilization and what Rosa Luxemburg once called "the ruins of imperialistic barbarism." We need to look at global capitalism and beyond that at what the United States and Britain are doing in Iraq, the principal zone of imperialist conflict at present, if we are to plumb the full depths of the barbarism that characterizes our time.

The Concept of Barbarism

The concept of "barbarism" has a long, complex lineage within social thought in general and socialist theory in particular. The Greek word barbaros originally referred to anyone who didn't speak Greek. The Greeks like all ancient civilizations portrayed themselves as living at the center of the world and all others as residing in a geographical and cultural periphery (or semi-periphery). After the Greek triumph in the Persian Wars all barbarians were viewed as inferior. The distinction between superior civilized peoples at the center of the world and inferior barbarians on the periphery was thus basic to Greek and Latin thought. Plato presented a doctrine of natural slavery in which he took it for granted that it was right for Greeks either to render death unto the barbarians or to enslave them. (1)

The most developed version of the distinction between barbarism and civilization introduced by the Greeks and Romans was to be found in the work of the Greek geographer Strabo (circa 64 BC--AD 24). Strabo had studied in Rome and reflected a Romanized view of the world. His seventeen volume Geography presented barbarism as representing an inverted world, in contrast to the Greeks and Romans, who had adopted "modes of life [production] that are civil." In his theory of barbarism and civilization the geographical difference was associated with different modes of production (Geography, 4.1.14). Civilized peoples lived on the most fertile soils where settled agriculture was feasible. Standing opposed to civilized, bread-eating peoples, who were principally city-dwellers (and farmers who lived in close proximity to cities), were barbarians who were nomadic fighters living on meat and dairy and permanently under arms. Barbarians were seen as preferring force and living under circumstances where they had no recourse other than marauding and thievery since confined to wilderness and removed from arable lands.

The notion of barbarism thus took on two meanings related to two conceptions of civilization. Insofar as civilization meant city-dweller, barbarism meant non-city-dweller, and particularly those living on the periphery. Insofar as civilization stood for the rule of law and culture, barbarism stood for the lack of both and the dominance of brutality. Barbarians were known for carrying out unconventional warfare. Confronted by the organized Roman army, "the barbarians," Strabo wrote, "carried on a guerilla warfare in swamps, in pathless forests, and in deserts" (1.1.17).

Nevertheless, the key aspect dividing civilization and barbarism, according to Strabo, was the differing mode of production of each. This was principally affected by geography, with the more barbaric populations living in less fertile, more mountainous regions further north that bordered the oceans. Strabo allowed for some cultural development among barbarian populations as they learned to cultivate more civilized modes of production. In fact, he described how some barbarians were "no longer barbarians" but were "transformed to the type of the Romans" when introduced to Roman "modes of living" (production) (4.1.12). In particular, once the barbarians started producing meats and other raw materials for the Roman Empire, they were seen as more civilized.

If in Greek and Latin literature civilization versus barbarism was formed around a notion of center and periphery, early socialists, who viewed the feudalism that succeeded the Roman Empire in Western Europe as constituting a thousand years of universal barbarism, saw barbarism as a stage of development not simply confined to the periphery. For French utopian socialist Charles Fourier barbarism was the stage that preceded civilization. Barbarism was defined by force and the absolute enslavement of women. It came to its climax with the rise of large-scale slavery. Following in barbarism's wake, civilization, which he saw as typified by monogamous marriage and civil liberties for the wife and as introducing large-scale industry and the class struggle associated with it, was just as brutal in many ways as barbarism but more cunning in form. In fact, Fourier argued that civilization entailed the exploitation of the world's population and an increase in armed conflict: