ALB
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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.
“If landlords relied on land rents etc., does this mean feudalism was still the system of society?”
No. I don’t think so. It means that at one point capitalism was a three-class society.
In any event I can’t see how they can be called capitalists.
Seems that for Charles I, “L’Etat, c’est moi” and that’s what the “middling sort” was struggling against so that the state became them or at least their executive committee.
I would hesitate to describe the landowners of the 18th and 19th centuries as capitalists. Some were that as well, but the classical political economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo analysed the capitalist economy as involving three classes: landowners who owned the land (whose income was ground rent), capitalists who invested capital (whose income was profit) and workers who produced wealth (whose income was wages).
Marx inherited and worked with this, identifying ground-rent as a levy on profits extracted from capitalists for the use of a portion of the Earth that landlords happened to monopolise. There was therefore a conflict of class interest between landowners and capitalists which played out on the political field in the 19th century, with the capitalist class gaining more and more political control until finally assuming full control with the emasculation of the House of Lords in 1910. Since then, I think it can be said, the landlord class has been absorbed into the capitalist class both through inter-marriage and through the investment of the proceeds of ground-rent in capitalist enterprises.
I would not say that the landlord class were feudal but that they were not part of the capitalist class. The royal family can be classified historically as members of this class rather than as capitalists. It would be interesting to know how much of the personal incomes of Charles I and Charles II came from ground rent as opposed to any profits from the commercial activities they might have happened to have been engaged in. Are there any studies on this?
If the Supreme Court dared to ban abortion all hell would break loose. I don’t think they will even with a raving Roman Catholic as one of them.
They can’t say they weren’t warned what would happen if they let the students travel all over the country to their universities. The lecturers union warned that this would spread the virus. And it has. And now they don’t know what to as they can’t led the students go back home now.
This government is proving to be a bunch of incompetents over this issue even from a capitalist standpoint. True, they are under pressure from sections of business and their delegates in parliament and as the traditional party of business they have to take this into account.
The Bolshevik themselves long thought that the coming revolution in Russia could only be a “bourgeois revolution” (they described both 1905 and March 1917 as that) in the sense of establishing a democratic republic within which capitalism and the working class could develop further and that it would be this even if the worker-peasant alliance they advocated came to power.
In fact this position is the origin of the theory, developed by later leftwing critics of the Bolsheviks, that the whole of 1917 was a bourgeois revolution without the bourgeoisie and even against the bourgeoisie. For instance, the Dutch Left Commuists who published a pamphlet under the title of The Bourgeois Role of Bolshevism.
I know we have taken this up but calling 1917 a “bourgeois revolution” still seems odd. A revolution carried out on behalf of the bourgeoisie from which they came to benefit is one thing and a revolution which annihilated them as such is another.
At the end of the 1920s with the Bolshevik government in difficulties many thought that the private capitalists who had grown up under the NEP would overthrow the Bolshevik regime and that this meant that a reconstituted bourgeoisie would be the beneficiaries of the revolution. Kautsky did. And so did Stalin who took drastic steps to stamp out this possibility. People also talked about the leaders of the Bolshevik party becoming a “red bourgeoisie” but that would be stretching things a bit even if this group were the beneficiaries of 1917. And of course 70 or so years later a new bourgeoisie did benefit from it.
A “state capitalist revolution”, leading to the rule of a new state capitalist class, might be a better way of putting it. In any event, it was a political revolution (fundamental change of who controlled political power) that paved the way for the easier development of capitalism — just like what happened in England in the middle of the 17th century.
By the way some capitalists did in fact support the 1905 uprising by letting their workers go on strike and by financing the revolutionaries.
He must be joking. How can they appoint a strict Roman Catholic who therefore takes orders from the pope on certain issues to the Supreme Court. Even on their terms it’s against the US constitution as the judges have to swear to uphold that and not take orders from abroad.
Daniel De Leon once write a pamphlet against “ultramontanism” which this would be. And surely it won’t appeal to evangelicals and other know nothings (or should that be Know Nothings?) who are part of Trump’s electoral base.
Lenin: family of tailors.
Are you sure about that? According to this, his father’s father had been a tailor and former serf but his father was a government official who rose to the rank of noble (but not of the sword of course !):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Ulyanov
Not that it matters all that much.
I can see the problem with the term “bourgeois revolution” as it implies, and was original intended to mean, a political revolution led by the bourgeoisie as in France but also by their equivalents in England and the English colonies in North America. But this doesn’t cover how the obstacles to further capitalist development cane to be removed in Japan and Russia for instance.
But the term has come to have a wider meaning amongst Marxists even if , taken literally, it is misleading for non-Marxists who do take it literally or for anti-Marxists who want to use it to criticise Marxism.
I suppose the most appropriate alternative would be “pro-capitalism revolution” . That would cover the various other social groups that have carried out such political revolutions in other parts of the world.
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.”
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 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.
