Reason and Science in Danger.
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In Scotland the Stuarts had been feudal nobility, but they have a long history. Scotland supported France in the Hundred Years War, its rulers had not been decimated in the Lancaster/York slaughter which finished off the Plantagenets. It was England’s traditional enemy, next to Spain and France. Charles’ heritage was of course feudal, but when his father was moved from Edinburgh to be King of Great Britain in 1603, he inherited then the Tudor legacy, which was a massive rural revolution without objection from the deceased old nobility, who were gone, and replaced with new court parasites from the Tudor ranks.
It was an increasingly post-feudal, pre-capitalism proper, society, sometimes known as “bastard feudalism” to distinguish it from feudalism proper.
I would say that, instead of it being a case of feudalism vs the bourgeoisie, (which it had been in the Middle Ages), it was a case of the bourgeoisie of the towns: merchants and nascent industry vs rural primitive capitalists (to use Marx’s term) and a king who was a pain in the neck and a hindrance to the laissez faire the bourgeoisie wanted. But while these are the socio-economic realities, the surface, ideological realities which are produced by them are just as real, and take on, as we know, a life of their own. People were not thinking class imperative, even though it lay at the base of the events. People were thinking religion: puritanism, papistry, divine right, arminianism, God’s will, etc. Culture is superstructure, but superstructure is nonetheless real, and lends motive to action.
The state became them …
But Charles had lost the state. He had an army, and set up his own state (government) in Oxford, and he no longer controlled London, which nonetheless was obliged to defend itself.
We call someone who lives on rent a small capitalist, don’t we, yet we don’t mean capitalist in the sense that Forbes is, or Lord Sainsbury. We only use the term because the small “capitalist” doesn’t need to work for a living, if he has enough from rent.
I worked in a small independent supermarket. The owner filled up the potatoes with me and handed me boxes of bananas, but he didn’t need to. He left to play cricket without needing permission and he employed a manager. I guess he is a capitalist.
Btw, he looked like Oliver Cromwell – who I believe was a rural landlord. (Gentry, or bourgeois?)
‘It seems Charles I relied on levying of taxes and fines for the most part. He was always strapped for cash.’
But wasn’t that the case with many preceding monarchs including those that were indisputably Feudal? I don’t see how this makes him a capitalist. Anyways moving on – now I have to contend with ALB’s ‘three- class society’ which, presumably excludes the aristocracy and peasantry leaving us with two types of capitalist and a proto working class in the 1640’s? Talk about a ‘critique of the critique’ – this forum certainly keeps you on your intellectual toes.
No, I read books when teacher wasn’t watching, and later when the boss wasn’t watching.
I was thinking, Wez, more of the 18th and 19th centuries than the 17th and said so. But how do you get from this “two types of capitalist” in the 1600s? That’s not my view. For me the landowning class is essentially the same as the aristocracy (whose privilege Clause 6 of our declaration of principles speaks of ending as well as plutocratic privilege).
I think, TM, you may be confusing ground rent with interest and/or house rent (which is a price). Yes, there are small capitalists living off the interest on the money they have invested either in shares or in bonds who are sometimes called rentiers. House rent is the price of occupying a house or part of it owned by a capitalist who has invested money in buying it.
Ground rent, on the other hand, is a payment that the owner of a piece of land extracts from those who want to use it eg to build a factory or a house or to mine minerals (when it’s called a “royalty”), the more desirable the land is the more they can extract. To get it, they don’t have to lift a finger or invest a penny; it accrues to them simply because they have property rights over the land. They are parasites on parasites, forcing the capitalists to pay them a share of the surplus value they get by exploiting wage-labour.
Two provisos. Most land is not virgin land but has had capital invested in improving it so that part of the income of a landowner is interest on this.
Second, while this was the system of landownership that existed in Britain, in other parts of Europe different systems existed giving a different class configuration, in particular a large class of peasant-owners.
At the beginning of capitalism, there were three social classes, and the Communist Manifesto indicates that one of those classes became proletarian. The term peasants are not completely applicable in our time when the agriculture workers are salaried workers or wages slaves like the industrial workers, and the office or professional workers and heavy industrial machinery are being applied in the agriculture fields and many workers have been replaced by those machines.
Many peasants are moving to the cities and they are becoming salaried workers and they have lost the small piece of lands that they owned, in the Caribbean and El Salvador most small peasants have sold everything and they have moved to the city or to other industrial countries to become proletarians, the natural tendency of capitalism is to split society into two social classes
At the present time, we are living in a society divided into two social classes, the so-called middle class is only a fallacy created by capitalism, but it existed in prior epoch during the first stages of capitalism, and it used to be called petty bourgeoise, a term which was wrongly applied constantly by the Stalinists and the Leninists as a derogatory terminology, some small business owners are salaried workers because they must applied a salary to themselves to survive
All these historical processes have been explained in the Communist Manifesto, the Conditions of the working class in England, and From Utopian, to Scientific socialism, and in regard to Russia it was explained by Lenin in the Development of Capitalism in Russia, and Georgi Plekhanov covered many of the economical aspects of Russia before the emergence of the Bolsheviks. if we do not go to the proper sources we will never get to the bottom of the barrel
‘It seems Charles I relied on levying of taxes and fines for the most part. He was always strapped for cash.’
But wasn’t that the case with many preceding monarchs including those that were indisputably Feudal? I don’t see how this makes him a capitalist. Anyways moving on – now I have to contend with ALB’s ‘three-class society’ which, presumably excludes the aristocracy and peasantry leaving us with two types of capitalist and a proto working class in the 1640s? Talk about a ‘critique of the critique’ – this forum certainly keeps you on your intellectual toes.
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He is heavily dealing with the individualistic conception of history. I do not know how he passed the questioning of membership of the party, because that is against the Materialist Conception of History. Before I joined the WSM I spent a great deal of time reading the index of the World Socialist Movement and the SPGB in order to remove all the distortions that I had in mind due to the influences of several decades of Leninism and Stalinism. I had to become a student again and I had already read most of the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Hoxha, Stalin, Mao, Deleon, and others, and still, I am a student of socialism/communism, and I grew up with peoples who knew more than me, and I had known many organizations and personalities. The WSM/SPGB is a university on socialism, and many peoples want to come to this forum like teachers instead of being students
According to the Cromwell Association, there is some controversy about his social and economic status quoting one historian that
”when Cromwell lived at St Ives, as ‘his standing … was essentially that of a yeoman, a working farmer’, and he was “even in danger of moving down ‘from the gentry to the “middling sort”’. Morrill is quick to point out that Cromwell never actually left the ranks of the gentry – he retained the lineage, education and social network of the well-born – but, in economic terms ‘Cromwell was not, then, as he is often portrayed, the typical country squire’.“
Farmer Oliver? The cultivation of Cromwell’s image during the Protectorate
Not that it really matters any more than Lenin’s.
Academic education, professional training or jobs will not help either because I had several degrees and it did not help, and I grew up with Jesuits, Salesian, La Salle brothers, and Dominicos and it did not help either, but for my parent, it was their best choice, in that time It was a privilege to study with them, and they had the best academic curriculum. My first mentor in this movement was a factory worker, a tailor, a shoe shiner, a hillbilly, and they knew more than me, ( and they were cadres ) they gave me the first push, everybody gave up, or are stuck in the same old ideas except me, and I was the only one who moved forward because I opened the windows and doors of my mind in order to learn, and I listened to others peoples. The SPGB/WSM should do like other organizations, they should provide economic and political training and knowledge to sympathizers before becoming a member
“Karl Marx stated that, in the words of David Harvey, primitive accumulation “entailed taking land, say,enclosing it, and expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat, and then releasing the land into the privatised mainstream of capital accumulation”.
(Wikipedia)
David Harvey likes to twist Karl Marx similar to Richard Wolf. The English church when they expropriated the catholic church they also produced an original accumulation of capital. Marx called the original accumulation of capital the original sin of capitalism, and it was like that. Everything that we want to learn about political economy and the logic of capital is in the Three volumes of capital and the theory of surplus-value
“The spoliation of the Church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the state domains, the theft of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of ruthless terrorism, all these things were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalist agriculture, incorporated the soil into capital [a very interesting phrase], and created for the urban industries the necessary supplies of free and rightless proletarians…”
“It was the agricultural producer, the peasant, that dominated feudal society and it was this producer that had to be torn from their means of production (the land) in order to be hurled as free and unattached workers on to the labour market. The expropriation of the agricultural producer (the peasant) from the soil was the basis of the whole process.
In England, serfdom had practically disappeared by the end of the 14th century. The immense majority of the population consisted then, and to a greater extent in the 15th century, of free peasant proprietors producing for their own needs. This was so even though the title under which the peasant held the land was feudal in character and involved an increasingly obsolete code of obligations and duties, such as armed service for the lord, work on the roads and harvesting the lord’s crops. Such wage labourers as existed were peasants working part of their time on the large estates, together with an insignificant number of wage labourers.
Besides, any wages, the peasants’ entitlements included four or five acres and a cottage. All peasants enjoyed the use of common land, which gave pasture to their cattle and the right to harvest timber and firewood. The soil was divided among the greatest number of sub-feudatories.Such conditions, together with the prosperity of the towns so characteristic of the 15th century, allowed the existence of wealthy people but it excluded the possibility of capitalist wealth.
The beginning of the revolution that lay the basis for the capitalist mode of production took place in the late 1400s and early 1500s. Huge numbers of free labourers were thrown on to the marketby the disbanding of the feudal retinues. There had been a long and slow decline of the feudal nobility commencing in the 13th century. In the heyday of feudalism there were sometimes 50 to 100 households living directly from the feudal lords. The number of these attendants began to decline during the 16th century.
There were many reasons for this. One of the most important was at the instigation of the Royal Power. Henry VII (reigned 1485-1509) came to power after the two greatest feudal houses, York and Lancaster had slaughtered each in a series of battles during the 1400s(the Wars of the Roses). Henry VII sought financial and political independence from the great feudal lords and sought to establish royal power as unchallengeable. Henry VII and later Tudor monarchs (Henry VIII, Mary and Elizabeth) were able in large measure to do this through a growing alliance with the merchants. The merchants looked to the monarch to provide security and stability for their own development, which constant warring between rival feudal factions could not. Thus the royal power, itself a product of bourgeois development in its struggle for absolute sovereignty, forcibly hastened the dissolution of the bands of retainers — in order to remove any threat to the royal power.
(Marxists.org My italics)
Marcos, what Harvey says is precisely what happened.
Seems you are so intent on extending the feudal era up to 1642 and making 1642-49 the capitalist revolution, that you are the one ignoring material realities and focussing on personalities (the “bourgeoisie”)!
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