ALB
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He is called Simon Gilbert and his article can be found here;
He also wrote;
”Land was not state owned, but neither was it dominated by a landed aristocracy on the scale of feudal Europe. Chinese landlords were always subordinate to a state bureaucracy that constantly sought to limit the size of landholdings and hence the landlords’ political power.”
And;
”While a disproportionate number of state officials came from the wealthier sections of society, the bureaucracy developed its own interests often in conflict with those of private landlords. A series of measures were adopted to limit the power of private landholders and to insulate officials from any specific landed interests. The most obvious of these was the abolition of primogeniture.“
I don’t know. I am not China expert and don’t claim to be. All I can do is to refer you to that article by the SWPer that you found (which I thought was very informative). He says;
”Chinese landlords were much smaller scale than their European counterparts, relations with their tenants were also very different. Because of the constant division of land, larger holdings tended to be fragmented. So, Kang Chao suggests, tenants must often have rented from more than one landlord, giving them a degree of independence from each. In some places tenancies could be bought and sold without the approval of the landowner. The relative strength of the tenants’ position is indicated by the high levels of rent default.
Payment of rent was essentially the only obligation of the tenant to the landlord. Labour obligations were to the state in the form of the periodic corvée—compulsory public labour performed outside the crucial sowing and harvesting seasons. It was the landowner, however, who was responsible for paying the land tax.”
He also wrote:
”The bureaucratic state is best understood not as an instrument of the rule of a private landowning class, but as a ruling class in its own right.”
DJP wrote: “Also when we are talking about the origins of capitalism we are going to be talking about more than two classes, it’s only with fully developed capitalism that the landowning and the former middle class get absorbed into each other“
That was a point I have been trying to make but neither side will have it. The one wants to say that the landlords of the tine were feudal and the other that they were “bourgeois”.
Marx of course worked with a three-class analysis, as far as Britain was concerned, in both his economic and political writings. Working class exploited for surplus value by the capitalist class who were forced by the landowners to share some of this with them as ground-rent.
What’s the point of these titbits of information? The MCH does not argue that the objective members of a class all automatically behave in a way that conforms to the overall objective interests of that class. That would be crude economic determinism. An easy Aunt Sally to knock down.
“NO BRETON WILL BE REFUSED”. You mean those people in berets selling onions from their bikes? I suppose that as relatives of the Ancient Britons they have more right to live in Britain than the Anglo-Saxon invaders.
A headline into today’s Times:
”Attenborough: Curb capitalism to save Earth”.
He is quoted as saying in a Radio 5 podcast:
”The excesses the capitalist system has brought us have got to be curbed somehow. That doesn’t mean to say that capitalism is dead. I’m not an economist and I don’t know, but I believe the nations of the world, the ordinary people worldwide, are beginning to realise that greed does not actually lead to joy”
Curbing capitalism — ie slowing down the rate of accumulation — won’t work because capitalism is precisely a system of capital accumulation sourced from profits. What might work is investment in non-fossil fuel energy becoming profitable as seems to be becoming the case, slowly.
Expecting capital accumulation to be curbed — the aim of all environmental pressure groups including XR — is just tilting at windmills. Capitalism can’t be curbed and it’s futile to try.
The only way out is to abolish capitalism altogether by making the Earth’s natural and industrial resources the common heritage of all so production can be geared to meeting people’s needs directly instead of to the accumulation of capital.
It’s all in that article by the SWPer you posted a link to. Accordingly to him, it would be the imperial bureaucracy as a collective-owning class. But I think it depends on what period of history you have in mind. Anyway, he seems to know what he’s talking about.
I read through that pamphlet-length article, Matt, and the introduction in which the author outlines the theory which he is going to criticise almost convinced me that the theory made some sense !
The criticism is basically that the concept is too wide to be useful as it covers so many different types of social and state structures. This is some validity in this but the theory doesn’t mean that sub-categories couldn’t be identified on the basis of something that some but not all share in common.
The other criticism is that they can’t all have been basically the same as otherwise how come that capitalism only emerged out of one of them — European feudalism? Therefore, this must have had a different “mode of production” to the others.
European feudalism had its own particular features and why capitalism emerged from it rather than one of the others is an important question. But this does not mean that the difference that led to this had to result from a different way in which the producers worked the land. That would be difficult to show.
In Defence of Marxism is the theoretical journal of those in the old Militant Tendency who remained loyal to Ted Grant and stayed in the Labour Party (where they still are I suppose).
There is another way out of the feudalism/not feudalism debate and that is to introduce a term that covers all pre-capitalist class societies:
The State and the Tributary Mode of Production
Actually, I think a good case can be made out for saying that the order of social evolution is: tribal communism, society based on the direct exploration of agriculture producers (peasants, if you like), capitalism, socialism.
That way, we don’t have to argue that feudal Europe was more advanced than the Roman Empire or that European feudalism existed all over the world. It was just the peasant-exploiting society out of which capitalism evolved. Capitalism then spread to the rest of the world at the expense of other types of peasant-exploiting societies.
That blog post that YMS put up shows how in popular parlance “feudalism” has come to be associated with open robbery of the producers as opposed to the more subtle and not so obvious robbery that capitalism brings about by the operation of its economic laws. A consequence of the ideological victory of the Intellectual champions of the rising bourgeoisie over their opponents, the defenders of feudalism.
I thought we had reached a consensus that “revolution” had a political sense as a more or less rapid change in political control whereas the better word for what you have just referred to would be “evolution”, a gradual socio-economic change that eventually prepares the ground for a political revolution (as happened in 1640).
Otherwise we start to go round in circles again.
More on the Sunak’s supposed “sacred responsibility to balance the books” from column by Sunday Times economic editor, David Smith, in today’s Times:
”The reality is different. Balanced budgets are rare. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s database goes back to 1948 and there are no years in which public sector net borrowing— the budget deficit — was exactly zero. In thirteen years there was a budget surplus; of these, eight were under Labour governments, five under the Tories.”
Incidentally, that means that in those 72 years there was a budget deficit in 59 of them — and the (capitalist) world didn’t come to an end. So a budget deficit is not even a big problem for capitalism let alone for wage workers (in fact it’s not our problem at all).
The problem is not whether or not by 1640 the capitalist mode of produced had largely replaced feudalism as production by serfs tied to the land — obviously it had, otherwise those in favour of it developing would have had no material basis for their struggle — but which class (if any) the Charles I regime represented.
Here’s how the two authors of the book describe the problem (without necessarily agreeing with it; nor do I):
“In examining the character of class conflicts in the making of the first ‘stage’ in the English Revolution, the ‘Great Revolution’ of 1640, traditional Marxist explanations of the Civil War have focused on the role of the rising gentry, conceived as an emerging bourgeois class. The two sides in the Civil War, parliamentary forces and royalists, are thus conceived as the agents of two opposing classes representing antagonistic modes of production: a rising capitalism and declining feudalism. This interpretation has not fared well with the more contemporary historiography and has been largely abandoned. A problem with it has been the difficulty in identifying the continuing existence of a distinctly feudal class to which the rising capitalist bourgeoisie was opposed. For by the time of the English Civil War, the ruling landed classes were, according to Robert Brenner, ‘by and large – though not of course uniformly – capitalist, in the sense of depending on commercial farmers paying competitive rents, rather than one that was sharply divided into advanced and backward sectors’.”
They go on to add:
“Yet the extent of Brenner’s depiction of such a thoroughgoing capitalist transformation of pre-revolutionary England society remains open to much debate. Henry Heller, for example, has pointed out that the nobility in northwest England remained an outpost of feudal reaction, and that this area was a royalist stronghold throughout the period.”
I don’t think these reactionary nobles could be described as being part of the bourgeoisie, so I don’t go along with the idea that the Civil War was between two sections of the bourgeoisie. But was Charles ruling on their behalf? Of course they supported him but they can’t have been much help in solving the financial difficulties of his state.
