ALB
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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.
Yes I think Old Japan is considered to have had a system similar to European feudalism.
The point is to examine empirically the situation in each part of the world. But I think it is already clear that European feudalism was not a universal form. Pre-capitalist exploitative societies in other parts of the world were much more centralised.
Marcos has already raised the question of how to classify the systems in the pre-Columbus Americas. Karl Wittfogel who wrote a book on the Asiatic mode of production which he called Oriental Despotism categorised the Inca and Aztec societies as such. I don’t know if the “Communist” parties of the area tried to say they were feudalism but it wouldn’t surprise me if they did.
That looks like an official history issued by the current rulers of the Chinese state. For the reasons explained, they would say pre-capitalist China was feudalism, wouldn’t they !
All I was doing was drawing attention to the controversy as to whether pre-capitalist China was feudalist or not. Looking for the quote from Marx where he talks of the evolution of society and mentions one of the epochs as “the Asiatic mode of production” (it’s in his Preface to his A Critique of Political Economy) I noticed that the Moscow editors had added this footnote:
”In the above text, Marx mentions “Asiatic” modes of production. In the idea of an Asiatic mode of production, Marx and Engels were following Hegel’s schema, see: The Oriental Realm). They later dropped the idea of a distinctive Asiatic mode of production, and kept four basic forms: tribal, ancient, feudal, and capitalist.”
To be taken with a pinch of salt as Moscow didn’t want the Russian state capitalist regime there to be seen as a modern example of the Asiatic mode of production with a ruling class collectively owning the means of production via the state.
This does not mean that there might not be a case for saying that China was feudalism but will explain why Stalinist academics would want to insist on this.
You say that but to call China feudal is to beg the question. In fact, the nature of Chinese pre-capitalist society was highly controversial within the Moscow-directed “Communist “ parties in the 1920s and 1930s.
Some China specialists inside and outside Russia took up Marx’s suggestion that besides ancient slave society, feudalism and capitalism there was a fourth type of class society that he called the Asiatic mode of production. In this communistic village communities continued to exist but society was ruled by a bureaucracy, headed by an absolutist ruler, whose economic role was to organise and maintain irrigation systems on which the agriculture practised in the village communities depended and which were taxed to pay for this (and the maintenance of the bureaucracy).
This meant that society was ruled by a collective ruling class based on the state ownership of key means of production (the irrigation works). Some of Stalin’s ideologists realised that this could be applied to Russia — and in fact it was, as by the dissident Boris Souvarine in his book Stalin in which he argued that Russia was a modern society of this type where a ruling class owned the main means of production collectively with a despot at their head — and from then on further investigation of this concept was banned and it was decreed that all pre-capitalist societies throughout the world were “feudalism”.
I was thinking more of the Spanish Empire in Europe. Loot from its overseas empire might have made the dynastic state less dependent on taxing merchants in Europe and so less need to make concessions to them. I don’t know. Just putting forward an idea to investigate.
ps I am not saying that China at the time was feudalism. One theory is that it was a development of Marx’s Asiatic Mode of production, sometimes also called Oriental Despotism.
I was thinking of China and the Ottoman Empire in the 1600s but the case of China raises the question of why capitalism developed in the west of Europe but not in China when in the 1600s both these parts of the world were at the same stage of economic and technological development. The question is addressed in this article (don’t worry, it is not all in Portuguese):
https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0101-31572017000100167&lng=pt&nrm=iso
The article suggests that it was due to the state there being so strong that it didn’t need to depend on taxing merchants to survive and so did not have to make concessions to them,
If this is a correct analysis, it suggests that, if Spain had prevented the establishment of the Dutch Republic and if the Spanish Armada had conquered England, then capitalism might not have taken off in Europe either, as the Spanish empire would have been too strong.
I am not saying it is correct but it seems at least plausible — and perhaps a reason for saying that Habsburg Spain was not a capitalist state.
Yes I would think that the resistance to Napoleon would be the beginning of Spanish nationalism but that’s outside the period we are talking about. The question is was there such a feeling or a ruling class attempt to inculcate such a feeling amongst the subjects of the Habsburg empire living in the Iberian Peninsula in the 17th century.
I don’t think the example of the Japanese Empire is a valid analogy as you could say the same about the British Empire. In any event, nationalism, as the belief that the people of a particular geographical area share a common interest and destiny, had become a common bourgeois ideology in the 19th century.
And going back to the 1600s, were the Ottoman and Chinese dynastic empires, which also participated in world trade, also thereby capitalist nation-states?
That’s a coincidence as I was about to come back on this. Habsburg Spain did take part in the world market as a “world power”, in fact as the strongest. According to Immanuel Wallerstein, that was its undoing as it relied on plunder from its empire rather than trade to increase the wealth of its ruling class and so failed to adapt its internal economy to run on capitalist lines (production for sake on an anonymous market with a view to profit).
Participating in the capitalist world market did not thereby make a state a capitalist state. So I think it is wrong to describe Habsburg Spain as this, and even more wrong to say it was a “nation state”, let alone the first one.
The growing feeling of the people of England constituting a “nation” with a national interest and destiny that you draw attention to as beginning to happen in Elizabethan England supports the contention that England or the Dutch Republic are the best candidate for being labelled the first nation-state.
The subjects of the Spanish Empire did not regard themselves as a nation and there was no attempt to try to inculcate in them that they were.
As to when Spain went through its bourgeois revolution in the sense of political power passing into the hands of the bourgeoisie, I don’t know. Marcos is our expert on things Spanish. But there were quite a few attempts to establish a Spanish Republic in the 19th and early 20th centuries, some successful for a while.
Some of the current nobility are descended from the illegitimate children of Charles II. He had at least 14 so perhaps he was more of a sultan than feudal ruler. Princess Airhead was apparently descended from him, which means that her son, Prince William, will be one of them too. When/if he becomes king the Royalists can have the last laugh as a descendant of Charles II ascends the throne —even if only as a powerless figurehead, though still a big landowner and the head of decayed aristocracy.
