Reason and Science in Danger.
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The Spanish Empire was global enough, and the envy of the Dutch and English, and it lasted as long, if not longer, than the British.
Strange then that after parliament’s victory one of their first acts was to abolish feudal economic relationships. You seem to have been convinced by Whig historians that there was no Bourgeois revolution in England (unlike those French barbarians) – something us Marxists have long dismissed as propaganda. Read Christopher Hill and learn.
Am I now supposed to be supporting the Catholic Church because I pointed out some good things about the medieval Church?
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You want to be careful matey, there was another bloke called Thomas More who was saying positive things about the Catholic Church, look what happened to him!
I do not know who is your historical information source, but they are completely wrong and backward including the history of Spain, which was a colonial power, governed by a Monarchy, but it was not a capitalist power until it had a capitalist revolt, it sounds like the Bolivarians who have said that neoliberalism started in South America when the European colonial power took the territories when Liberalism has not even existed in Europe yet
Karl Marx and Engels were able to prove that history was not made by kings, priests, queens, militaries heroes, or personalities, what you are indicating is an old historical concept known as the individualist conception of history which was defeated many years ago, it sounds like Hollywood movie which indicates that Spartacus was the one who overthrew slavery instead of the slaves themselves, but a new form of slavery was adopted and until now we are living under a new form of slavery. The Communist Manifesto explains that process very well
Feudalism was an economic system or a mode of production that existed in Europe and it was overthrown by capitalist revolutions, ( including Russia 1n 1905/1917 which was a semi-feudal nation ) and it emerged firstly in England, that is the reason why Karl Marx wrote his book Capital based on the English mode of production because by that time capitalism had not emerged completely in Europe, the French revolution was a bourgeoise revolt against the monarchy and against Feudalism, the Jacobins were the representative of the French bourgeoise class
Thomas More wrote
Am I now supposed to be supporting the Catholic Church because I pointed out some good things about the medieval Church?
As for Latin America, have you not heard of Oscar Romero, the fact that nuns and priests have been tortured under CIA supervision, that protestants assisted in the murder of native people in Guatemala? Again, not to specifically support Catholicism, but just to point these things out.
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Oscar Romero was assassinated because he publicly opposed the Operation Condor and the Death Squad of El Salvador which was an operation financed and initiated by the USA ruling class, and he was one of the followers of the so-called liberation theology, which will not liberate anybody from the oppression and exploitation of capitalism, and the Catholics Church was against him too, and there are rumours that the new pope was an accomplice of his assassination, as well the new pope was part of the repressive government of Videla in Argentina, and they collaborated with the repressive forces and they were part of the coup
In Argentina Catholics, priests denounced others priest which were killed by the government death squads, and in the Dominican Republic several Salesians and La Salle Brothers were deported with the consent of the Catholic Church, Aristides the ex-president of Haiti was also a priest and the Catholic Church collaborated with the coup of the USA and France, and he was planning to declare Voodoo as the official religion of Haiti.
The Catholic church had signed Concordatos with many of those dictators and they had to give them the 10% of the national production, and they had to declare Catholicism is the official religion in order to obtain protection, it is similar to the accord of the Sicilian mafia, they supported Rafael L Trujillo until he stopped supporting them, and they collaborated with the CIA in order to overthrow him, as well they collaborated with the CIA in order to overthrow Juan Bosh and Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, and at the beginning of the so-called Cuban revolution they collaborated with the rebels until they were expropriated
There are also several protestant groups such as the Quakers who are working with the Venezuelans and Bolivians natives in commune an in the agriculture field, but they will not liberate the Indians from the oppression and domination of capitalism, it is just a reformist movement like liberation theology and the charismatic groups
What happened in Guatemala was that many Catholics priests were killed and the Evangelical grew up as a big movement because becoming an evangelical was a safeguard against the police and military repression but that movement was also backed by the USA government ( like they did in South Korea ) and they ended up supporting an Evangelical who became president of Guatemala, but it was not that the evangelicals murdered the natives, it was the government and the president could have been a Catholics, an evangelical, atheist, or an Islamic
In Greece they also passed a law which prohibits to worship paganism, and in Italy a personality was taking to court because he negated the existence of Jesus christ
I think TM has a point. Feudalism as a system where barons exploited serfs had already ended in England by the beginning of the 17th century. The Tudor monarchs had destroyed the power of the barons and concentrated political power in the hands of the monarchy. Serfdom, as labour service to the lord of the manor, had died out and been replaced by money rent. The last serfs were formally freed in 1574.
In other words, capitalism as an economic system (with a money economy) had largely come to replace feudalism. What the English Civil War was about was a political struggle, a struggle to take political power from the monarchy, which had become an obstacle to the further development of capitalism, and vest it in a parliament controlled by capitalist farmers, merchants and manufacturers who wanted to use it to further their economic interests; which is what happened under Cromwell.
In that sense the overthrow of the monarchy was a “bourgeois revolution”, later consolidated in 1688 by the so-called Glorious Revolution (the English bourgeoisie’s own term for it) that overthrow the catholic king James II who foolishly wanted to turn the clock back.
Yes, but the monarchist was not capitalist, and capitalism did not emerge without a revolution, and Spain was not the first capitalist country who existed around the world, in that case, they would have established capitalism in Latin America as the English did in North America. Karl Marx himself said that the expropriation of the Catholic by the English church created one of the first original accumulation of China
According to Immanuel Wallerstein’s theory of capitalism as a world-system (with a hyphen), capitalism from the start, in the middle of the 16th century, has been a system of production for sale on a world (inter-national) market of goods produced within states none of which is strong enough to dominate it. In these circumstances market forces come into operation which force all participating states to encourage capitalist methods of production so as to keep costs down and be competitive in this world market.
At one time Spain was a possible candidate to dominate the world market and so be in a position to resist its pressures but in the end wasn’t powerful enough. It also failed to convert its internal economy to capitalist production methods, relying instead for wealth on imports of silver and gold from its empire in America. It did compete on the world market but not successfully because it had failed to adopt capitalist methods of production. This is why it was eventually left behind and went into decline (despite the Catholic counter-reformation).
I agree with some of what ALB says but many of the King’s supporters still used the old feudal way of farming. They looked down on the nouveau riche capitalist farming and they in their turn saw the old farming practices as wasteful and as under-exploited land. At least this is the perspective of Christopher Hill who was regarded as the preeminent historian of the period. The idea that the events of 1642 were the result of an internecine struggle between different sections of the capitalist class (TMs understanding) is something I have not heard before and is counter to the Marxian analysis as I and CH understand it. I suppose it could be a semantic argument in terms of the definition of ‘feudalism’.
Thomas More will be interested in this book review
“In The Light Ages, Seb Falk unpicks many of these popular assumptions. He points out that several accounts of the history of science begin sometime around 1600, as though scientific inquiry just popped out of the ground like a mushroom. But a mushroom is just the visible surface growth of a larger organism. And the same applies to medieval scientific thinking, which was complex, interconnected and wide-ranging. Far from being resistant to foreign ideas, medieval thinkers systematically translated works from Greek, Hebrew and Arabic by writers from Iberia to Persia. Falk speaks of the “irresistible medieval drive to tinker, to redesign, to incrementally improve or upgrade technology” and the same was true of scientific thought.”
An irresistible “drive to tinker, to redesign, to incrementally improve or upgrade technology” is what you would expect in any society not just feudalism. In fact it’s a basic assumption of the materialist conception of history. As Anton Pannekoek put in in his Marxism and Darwinism:
“It is self-understood that the people are ever trying to improve these tools so that their labor be easier and more productive, and the practice they acquire in using these tools, leads their thoughts upon further improvements. Owing to this development, a slow or quick progress of technique takes place, which at the same time changes the social forms of labor. This leads to new class relations, new social institutions and new classes. At the same time social, i. e., political struggles arise. Those classes predominating under the old process of production try to preserve artificially their institutions, while the rising classes try to promote the new process of production; and by waging the class struggles against the ruling class and by conquering them they pave the way for the further unhindered development of technique.”
Many thanks indeed.
Just to comment on prior posts:
The feudal system was long dead and gone by the time of Charles I. The enclosures had been well under way for a century, serfdom over by and large since the Black Death, the landscape very different, the peasantry evicted give or take a few pockets, the proletariat increased, the arable lands turned to pasture. Scotland would follow. Vestiges of the old system may well remain, and these were likely swept away in the 17th century – i’ll give you that – and there would have but remained legal formalities for parliament to deal with. So the realities were long gone.
True, the monarchy – the legacy of Henry VII – still controlled state power in 1640, and had to be dispossessed of it, and that was what the bourgeoisie – those of them opposed to the king, by no means all – achieved by means of the Civil War. In fact, Charles was not in control of parliament in 1642, and he was therefore already the rebel against the government (parliament) when he raised his standard at Nottingham. His son Charles II finally signed away any vestiges of the old order in 1660, but he was no underling of the bourgeoisie but a colonial capitalist himself, and the parliamentarians who had signed his father’s death warrant were hunted down internationally and killed!
The truth is, the revolution which began with Henry VII’s victory in 1485 was a long tale of social and economic transformation which was finally confirmed politically by the bourgeoisie through parliament in 1688.
TM – So, to be clear, you believe that Capitalist hegemony was achieved through an evolutionary process and that the events in 1642 did not represent a bourgeois revolution? You would go as far as to say 1642 represented an internecine struggle between members of the capitalist class? I would reject both of these perspectives and suggest that you might be opposed in general to the Marxist theory of history?
In many ways one could say that science as we understand the term today grew out of “natural theology” or the religious study of nature which sought to identify divine purpose in the particular forms of nature. This is what the “argument from design” was about. If a watch implied the existence of a watchmaker then how could something much more complex like the human eye not presuppose God?
The argument from design was effectively demolished by Darwin but we should not overlook that much of the original impetus behind scientific discoveries on the part of generations of so called “gentleman scientists” exemplified by the likes of Derham, Paley and Gilbert White – before the era of institutionalised R & D – was driven by religious motives
So I dont think the argument is so cut and dried as is made out. Living in Andalucía, I am reminded of the role of the Muslim Moors in the historical region of Al Andalus in promoting science. Cordoba in the 10th century was the second largest city in Europe and comparatively speaking, a model of enlightenment, civic tolerance (Jews and Christians peacefully worked and lived alongside Muslims until the barbaric Christian Reconquista commenced) AND scientific progress . I read somewhere that there is a theory that the origins of the Renaissance can be traced back to Cordoba rather than the Italian city states
Religion reflects society rather than the other way round. And so does science! The notion that the practice of science is value free, objective, rational and impartial is pure nonsense. Scientists are as much prone to irrational tendencies such as confirmation biases as the rest of us and under capitalism are subject to enormous pressures to deliver results that serve the interests of the profit system, Though I wouldn’t go so far as individuals like Feyerabend in saying science is just another religion with its own high priests and holy dogmas but who can deny there is a smidgeon of truth in it? Look at the controversies surrounding COVID 19.
A healthy scepticism as far as science is concerned is definitely called for. I strongly recommend Carolyn Merchant’s wonderful book The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, published in 1980 which touches on the relationship between science and society.
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