ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Japan is not an issue. It did seem to have a system of decentralised war lords equivalent to Europe’s feudal barons.
Chins seems to have been more centralised ruled by a powerful emperor and a bureaucracy. Were the mandarins landowners? Was one of the tasks of the Emperor or them to maintain irrigation systems?
Ok. But dig out some stuff about the structure of Chinese society in 1600 AD (rather than BC) and later so we can have some information on which to make a judgement. It would also be useful to know how you would define “feudalism”. If it’s any pre- or non-capitalist society based on a landed ruling class exploiting those who work the land then we will know.
All this stuff about the structure of society in China 2000 years ago is interesting (I suppose) but has nothing to do with the origins of capitalism. What is relevant is whether the social structure of China in 1600 and to 1900 could be called “feudalism” or not.
Yes, I think the title deeds to my house say that I own the land in “fee simple”. I think that in theory all land in England still ultimately belongs to the Crown.
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.
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.“
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
Here is Christopher Hill’s definition of “feudalism” from a preface he wrote in 1955 (while still a member of the “Communist” Party) to a republication of a contribution he had written in 1940 for a textbook for CP members:
“I use the word feudal in the Marxist sense, and not in the more restricted sense adopted by most academic historians to describe narrowly military and legal relations. By “feudalism” I mean a form of society in which agriculture is the basis of economy and in which political power is monopolised by a class of landowners. The mass of the population consists of dependent peasants subsisting on the produce of their family holdings. The landowners are maintained by the rent paid by the peasants, which might be in the form of food or labour, as in early days, or (by the sixteenth century) in money. In such a society there is room for small handicraft production, exchange of products, internal and overseas trade; but commerce and industry are subordinated to and plundered by the landowners and their State.”
This is a rather broad definition that would apply to all sorts of situations that have existed in recent times (and still exist) in some parts of the world. It might even be said to have been tailored-made to fit the situation in England at the beginning of the 1600s (as well as to conditions in which the some Moscow parties were operating ,as in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia). It’s including a situation where the peasants are in effect tenants paying a money rent that’s the problem. I’d always assumed that feudalism was based on serf-labour and that serfs were tied to the land and exploited through being forced to work on the lord of the manor’s estate for nothing and also to have to hand over in kind a part of what they produced. A peasant paying a money rent would no longer be a serf; in fact, to get the money to pay the rent, they would have to be free to sell some of their produce to somebody somewhere.
Here is how he applied this to the situation in England in 1600 (it’s from the section on Land):
“The structure of society was still essentially feudal; so were its laws and its political institutions. There were still many legal restrictions on the full unhampered capitalist utilisation of landed property, on free trade in land. These restrictions were maintained in the interests of the Crown, the feudal landowning class, and to a lesser extent, of the peasantry, anxious to live in the old secure way paying the old fixed dues. (…) [T]here still persisted in many parts even of the south and east, and all over northern and western England, landowners who lacked either the ability, the capital, the psychology or the opportunity to exploit their estates in the new way. They were still attempting to maintain feudal pomp and ceremony, still running their estates in the traditional way. Their courts were thronged with blue-blooded hangers-on, poor relations and retainers, who performed no productive functions in society, but still believed that the world owed them a living – “Drones” was what the bourgeois pamphleteers called them, as they had called the monks before them (…) The focus of this society was the King’s Court. (…) Times were hard for these parasites and rentiers (…) Yet this class was still a social and political power; the State was organised to safeguard its interests. Its inability to reorganise its estates was keeping a large amount of capital uninvested. Much of the richest land in England was not utilised to the full technical capacities of the time. State power was being used to prevent the growth of a national market.”
This seems a rather strained attempt to show that pre-1640 England was rather like pre-1789 France. I don’t think it comes off. A commenter in the A Good Read of this early work of his says that “Later in his career, Hill qualifies his earlier notion that pre-Revolutionary England was ‘essentially feudal’” (presumably this was after he left the CP over Hungary). As well he might.
Having said this, I am a great fan of Hill and always buy any of his books when I see them in a charity shop. In fact during lockdown I finished reading his one on the English Bible. But I don’t think his early CP stuff is all that good.
More details below on the 1660 Act abolishing certain legal aspects of feudal property-holding that Wez mentioned. It seems to have more to do with the income of the king than with that of the land-holding nobility as it’s to do with what they pay him. I can’t see the nobility siding with the king just to preserve their feudal obligations to him.
Note that it was passed after the overthrow of the English Republic and the Restoration of the monarchy. So presumably the top nobles thought it was a good idea.
In any event, according to the discussion in the second link, this reform had already been enacted by the Long Parliament in 1646.
I thought I’d revive this old thread where we recorded various statements on how a bank works as ammo to use against the banking cranks. and their theory that banks can somehow create money to lend out of thin air. So here’s Ed Conway, Sky News Economics Editor, in today’s Times on an ordinary bank’s business model:
“For all the apparent complexity of finance, running a traditional bank is quite simple and comes down to the difference between two numbers. The first is the interest rate you charge customers when you lend them money; the second is the interest rate you pay them when they deposit their money with you. Provided the first number is more than the second, you’re in the money.”
I think Marx’ advice in a letter to a Russian publication in 1877 is relevant here:
“The chapter on primitive accumulation does not pretend to do more than trace the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist order of economy emerged from the womb of the feudal order of economy. It therefore describes the historic movement which by divorcing the producers from their means of production converts them into wage earners (proletarians in the modern sense of the word) while it converts into capitalists those who hold the means of production in possession. (…)
[M]y critic … feels himself obliged to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale [general path] imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself, in order that it may ultimately arrive at the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. (He is both honouring and shaming me too much.) Let us take an example.
In several parts of Capital I allude to the fate which overtook the plebeians of ancient Rome. They were originally free peasants, each cultivating his own piece of land on his own account. In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same movement which divorced them from their means of production and subsistence involved the formation not only of big landed property but also of big money capital. And so one fine morning there were to be found on the one hand free men, stripped of everything except their labour power, and on the other, in order to exploit this labour, those who held all the acquired wealth in possession. What happened? The Roman proletarians became, not wage labourers but a mob of do-nothings more abject than the former “poor whites” in the southern country of the United States, and alongside of them there developed a mode of production which was not capitalist but dependent upon slavery. Thus events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.“
That would be a drastic step but I don’t think that showing that some bourgeois sided with the absolutist state would disprove that the class struggle ( together with technological developments) is the driving force if history.
I don’t think that the materialist conception of history says that every single member of a particular class has to support the objective interests of that class. That would be more economic determinism than the MCH. Surely it suffices that the main force behind a particular historical change should come from the members of the class that is going to benefit from it. Which is demonstrably the case in what happened in England in the 1640s. Parliament was led by bourgeois property owners who wanted to free capitalism from the restrictions that the state was placing on its development and, with the “middling sort” as their mass basis, did seize political power in what was a political revolution.
Robbo, this appears to be about a period before the emergence of the Chinese Empire and its bureaucracy (“oriental despotism” ?). It appears that it had come to a demise by about 200 BC, even before feudalism was ever heard of in Europe and so nearly 2000 years before the period we have been discussing here. The Europe of that time was still in the state of what Marx called “ancient slave society” at least around the eastern Mediterranean; elsewhere there were tribal societies. In any event, there was no possibility of the Chinese feudalism of the time evolving into capitalism. I don’t think it’s really a relevant comparison.
No it doesn’t since as you have hinted at, once capitalism developed in one part of the world ( that happened for various reasons to be Europe) it could spread to other countries by diffusion rather than internal evolution, and did. Other parts of the world could leap into capitalism whatever their social structure or the stage of social evolution they happened to be at.
The same applies to socialism of course. Once socialism became historically possible it could be established all over the world whatever the stage of social evolution existing in some parts.
