ALB
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I don’t mind the word “despotism”. It’s the suggestion that this is only “oriental” that seems unfair as there are and have been plenty of Occidental despots !
I deliberately used the the word “Stalinist” to describe the theory that there was no such thing as the Asiatic Mode of Production and that pre-capitalist societies all over the world were feudalism. This was never the view of the second generation of those in the Marxist tradition such as Kautsky and Plekhanov and… before 1917 Lenin.
This article argues that Lenin not only accepted the AMP but even argued that the social system under Tsarism had aspects of it:
https://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv14n2/asiatic.htm
It is true that, once in power and needing the support of revolutionaries in Asia to come to the rescue of the Bolshevik regime, he was a bit embarrassed about associating “Asiatic” with backwardness.
Come to think of it, so should we as well as for associating “oriental” with “despotism”. We need a better term. But whatever it is it can’t be “feudalism”.
“What, then, about other Asian lands? The Islamic? Are we to assume that Tibetan serfdom is another Maoist lie?“
No idea but that’s not relevant since the argument is not that there are no examples outside Europe of what might be called feudalism but that there are some, perhaps most, that this description does not fit.
Each case needs to be decided on the evidence of an empirical study. So if there is evidence that something akin to European feudalism existed in Japan or Tibet does not mean that it did in China,
The Wikipedia entry on the Asiatic Mode of Production is quite good:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiatic_mode_of_production
I would highlight these two passages.
”In the 1920s, Soviet authors strongly debated about the use of the term. Some completely rejected it. Others, Soviet experts on China referred to as “Aziatchiki”, suggested that Chinese land ownership structures had once resembled the AMP, but they were accused of Trotskyism and discussion of AMP was effectively banned in the USSR from 1931 until the Khrushchev period”.
”The theory was rejected in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Karl August Wittfogel suggested in his 1957 book, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, that his concept of Oriental despotism showed that this was because of the similarity between the AMP and the reality of Stalin’s Russia; he saw the authoritarian nature of communism as an extension of the need of totalitarian rule to control water in “the Orient”.”
I am inclined to agree with Wittfogel.
Mao has just put the orthodox Stalinist view that China was feudal ( because there wasn’t anything else, according to their theory, that it could have been).
This link you posted in the other thread puts the case against calling China feudal:
Thanks for that important link. It shows that there is a good case against calling it feudalism. Also confirms what I said about the so-called “Marxist“ view being that of Stalinism for political reasons — not wanting to have an Asiatic Mode of Production as this was too close to home.
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.
