The Tudor revolution
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history is a tool that can be used by the bourgeoise using intellectuals in order to sub estimate the contributions made to world history by the simple working peoples, due to the fact as Engels said that the bourgeoise class was not very educated and there are too many paid reactionaries and recalcitrants historians. The best evidence is Donald Trump and his new history curriculum who wants to negate the contributions made by the black peoples in the history of the USA. I stick my gun to Karl Marx and Engels because they were peoples dedicated for more than 35 years to defend the interests of the working peoples of the world. We are not professional historians but we can do our own research, we can do our own homework using historians who had always defend the working class and have recognized the contributions made by the working class, I throw in the trash can the contributions made by Kings, Princess and state ministers
I am prepared to remain open on China being a feudal economy, but then you would have to make room for another ruling class betwixt feudalism and capitalism and another system, what you call Asian despotism, that is neither feudal nor capitalist.
But this also assumes that the Chinese throne was a constant. There are long periods of inter-dynastic chaos and fighting between warlords and princes. Who are these as a class? And there are peasant revolts. There are also barons like Chang Hsun who do not seek the throne for themselves, but who champion an imperial choice and are loyal.
There is a vast bureaucracy between peasant and Emperor, which constitute classes.
This is very good research made by the UNAM ( Autonomy University of Mexico ) about the Asiatic Mode of Production, and they establish a difference between the AMP and Feudalism, and both are pretty well described. UNAM is a very progressive university and it has been like that for many years and its student’s body is very progressive too, and they have good researchers on history, anthropology and medicine.
Thanks TM for correctly summarizing my thoughts on this subject. I can only think that Robbo has not been following the debate as closely as he might. ALB is commenting on the existence of different definitions of feudalism. Hill claims that his definition is the same as Marx’s – is this incorrect? Also the idea that Hill was influenced by Stalinism is rather far fetched. However it has been an ongoing disaster that the left have always been suckers for Bolshevik propaganda so it might be a possibility but if that were the case why does he continue to be respected by his peers – even by his enemies?. I still need to know the origin of the incomes of the conservative land owners who supported Charles I. ALB seems to think that the payment of money rents disqualifies them as feudal tenure and I’m not at all convinced by this.
Here’s a list of feudal tenures. I don’t think Charles I summoned the barons who owed the king military service to fight for him !
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudal_land_tenure_in_England
History and historians are like social classes, they are divided into two camps, those who defend the interests of the working peoples and those who defend the interest of the lazy and parasite class, and there are more defenders of the ruling class than the working class. Most historians must be researched using a magnifying glass or binoculars. I always stick my guns with my Compadre Dr Karl Marx
Marx and Engels devoted a couple of pages to defining feudalism in the opening section of The German Ideology (1845);
“Like tribal and communal ownership, it is based again on a community; but the directly producing class standing over against it is not, as in the case of the ancient community, the slaves, but the enserfed small peasantry. As soon as feudalism is fully developed, there also arises antagonism to the towns. The hierarchical structure of land ownership, and the armed bodies of retainers associated with it, gave the nobility power over the serfs. This feudal organisation was, just as much as the ancient communal ownership, an association against a subjected producing class; but the form of association and the relation to the direct producers were different because of the different conditions of production.
This feudal system of land ownership had its counterpart in the towns in the shape of corporative property, the feudal organisation of trades. Here property consisted chiefly in the labour of each individual person. The necessity for association against the organised robber-nobility, the need for communal covered markets in an age when the industrialist was at the same time a merchant, the growing competition of the escaped serfs swarming into the rising towns, the feudal structure of the whole country: these combined to bring about the guilds. The gradually accumulated small capital of individual craftsmen and their stable numbers, as against the growing population, evolved the relation of journeyman and apprentice, which brought into being in the towns a hierarchy similar to that in the country.
Thus the chief form of property during the feudal epoch consisted on the one hand of landed property with serf labour chained to it, and on the other of the labour of the individual with small capital commanding the labour of journeymen. The organisation of both was determined by the restricted conditions of production – the small-scale and primitive cultivation of the land, and the craft type of industry. There was little division of labour in the heyday of feudalism. Each country bore in itself the antithesis of town and country; the division into estates was certainly strongly marked; but apart from the differentiation of princes, nobility, clergy and peasants in the country, and masters, journeymen, apprentices and soon also the rabble of casual labourers in the towns, no division of importance took place. In agriculture it was rendered difficult by the strip-system, beside which the cottage industry of the peasants themselves emerged. In industry there was no division of labour at all in the individual trades themselves, and very little between them. The separation of industry and commerce was found already in existence in older towns; in the newer it only developed later, when the towns entered into mutual relations.
The grouping of larger territories into feudal kingdoms was a necessity for the landed nobility as for the towns. The organisation of the ruling class, the nobility, had, therefore, everywhere a monarch at its head.“
ALB your above link to a list of feudal tenures also includes this:
<b>Socage</b> (/ˈsɒkɪdʒ/)<sup id=”cite_ref-1″ class=”reference”>[1]</sup> was one of the feudal duties and hence land tenure forms in the feudal system. A farmer, for example, held the land in exchange for a clearly defined, fixed payment to be made at specified intervals to his feudal lord, who in turn had his own feudal obligations, to the farmer (principally those of protection) and to the Crown. In theory this might involve supplying the lord with produce but most usually it meant a straightforward payment of cash, i.e., rent.
Surely this means that your view of the payment of cash rents as being incompatible with feudal tenure is incorrect?
I am prepared to remain open on China being a feudal economy, but then you would have to make room for another ruling class betwixt feudalism and capitalism and another system, what you call Asian despotism, that is neither feudal nor capitalist.
If you remain open on China being a feudal economy, you are not open, you are closed on the idea that Feudalism also existed in Asia. The AMP covered an area larger than the whole European continent, and the research made by the unfinished works of Marx and Engels covered all that vast area of the world, even more, the Historian Francis Jennings did not use the expressions civilizations, he used the expression of civilization ( singular it is not plural ) and he rejected the conception of Barbarian
Marx and Engels devoted a couple of pages to defining feudalism in the opening section of The German Ideology (1845);
Marx and Engels were cultured and well-educated peoples and they covered many area and disciplines,( Richard Wold has also recognized the immense amount of knowledge cultivated by both ) the new MEGA works of 132 volumes are going to uncover many things that have not been published yet. I am ready to buy them, as I did with the 52 volumes, and all the collected works of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Trotsky, Hoxha and Stalin, I am really open to read and study everything, except reading the Collected Works of Donald Trump. L Bird has said something that it is very true: Workers must become intellectuals. The website of the SPGB/WSM, and the index is a university on socialism
Of course, we do have a talk on this sort of subject:
https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Ye-Olde-Worlde-Revolution-pt.1.mp3
The socialist party has covered many areas that peoples do not pay attention to. In 100 years it has accumulated a vast amount of information for the working class. it is the real library of the working class, next to the SPGB is the website of the SLP and the People newspaper. We must open the windows and doors of our minds to do research and look for a different type of sources, but we must learn to be critical and find the proper sources, besides Europe, there are many areas and personalities around the world who have also contributed to world history. Most peoples only associated the Arabs to a religion, but they do not look for the contributions made by them to sciences, history and philosophy, they also had their own materialist philosophers and historians
Yes I saw that “socage” was one of the forms of feudal tenure and was going to mention it with a link to the Wikipedia entry but decided not to and just refer to the list of various types of feudal tenure.
I am not a mediaevalist any more than anyone else here but I would imagine that it wasn’t all that widespread at the height of feudalism as it implies that a money economy has developed to some extent and also that it would be applied to those who were small independent landowners rather than to serfs.
I could be wrong of course but it is significant that the wiki entry says it became more and more widespread as feudalism declined. It would still have existed in law in 1600 but as a legal fiction, as a way of taking into account legally what had developed as an economic fact (landowners renting out their land to a tenant) — and providing a lucrative income for lawyers to arrange.
In any event if it was the main form of feudal tenure then I wouldn’t have thought that the system could really still be called “feudalism”. After all, farmers renting land from landowners and producing for the market still exists today. And I still say it is significant that the feudal tenures were abolished by an Act of Parliament in 1660, when the monarchy had been restored. It would seem that even they recognised that feudal tenures has become an unnecessarily complicated legal fiction.
The USA legal system used many feudal expressions inherited from the English feudal law, and some expressions in Latin were inherited from the Roman code. The whole course on Property is based on Feudal law of the tenancy of the land, and the law of torts is inherited from the Greco/Roman legal system, as we can see European capitalism inherited many legal aspects of the old two modes of production: Classical slavery and Feudalism
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