ALB
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“So it turns out this refers to 1688, yet you introduce it in the context of our discussion on the civil war, and then say it’s about 1688 after you notice it supports my argument and not yours.”
I was merely drawing attention to the fact that the “English Revolution” in the title of Marx’s article was that 1688 not the victory of Parliament over the king forty or so years before. In fact, at the time and up until Christopher Hill that’s what everybody meant by the term.
Obviously, though, you can’t discuss 1688 without discussing what happened in those preceding years as 1688 was the culmination of the struggle between parliament and king ending in the complete victory of parliament (which appoints William of Orange king by an Act of Parliament). Both Guizot, whose pamphlet Marx is reviewing, and Marx do this. Here’s what Marx wrote about Guizot’s interpretation:
“According to him, the whole struggle between Charles I and Parliament was merely over purely political privileges. Not a word is said about why the Parliament, and the class represented in it, needed these privileges. Nor does Guizot talk about Charles I’s interference with free competition, which made England’s commerce and industry increasingly impossible; nor about the dependence on Parliament into which Charles I, in his continuous need for money, fell the more deeply the more he tried to defy it. “
The passage which you took (correctly) as backing the view that the landowners created under Henry VIII were not feudal (“In fact, their lands were not feudal but bourgeois property“) was preceded by a passage that makes it clear that Marx was talking not just about 1688 but about Tudor times too:
“The English class of great landowners, allied with the bourgeoisie — which, incidentally, had already developed under Henry VIII — did not find itself in opposition — as did the French feudal landowners in 1789 — but rather in complete harmony with the vital requirements of the bourgeoisie. “
The grammar of the English translation makes it ambiguous as to which — the class of great landowners or the bourgeoisie — had already developed under Henry VIII. A check with the original German makes it clear that Marx is referring to the landed class. A literal translation would be : “the English class of allied-with-the-bourgeoisie great landowners — which incidentally, etc”. A comma in the English translation after “bourgeoisie” would have made this clear.
So, there is no difference between us on this point. The difference is that you see this landowning class as part of the bourgeoisie while I see it as a separate class (as does Marx, not that that settles anything beyond that that was Marx’s view).
In section 3 of Volume I of Capital, Marx says that a commodity has two forms: “a physical or natural form, and a value form” and goes on:
”The value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition. Turn and examine a single commodity, by itself, as we will, yet in so far as it remains an object of value, it seems impossible to grasp it. If, however, we bear in mind that the value of commodities has a purely social reality and that they acquire this reality only in so far as they are expressions or embodiments of one identical social substance, viz., human labour, it follows as a matter of course, that value can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity”
So. Marx does indeed say that value has a “purely social reality” in that it is an expression of a non-physical social relation. But this not mean that its magnitude is purely arbitrary and can be changed by a vote or some other act of collective will. It depends, as he says, on the amount of socially necessary labour that has been embodied in it.
Marxian economics certainly does not hold that the value of a commodity depends on what people collectively decide it is (though there is a school of capitalist economic theory that does hold that view).
And it certainly does mean that the other form of a commodity — its “physical or natural form” — also has a “purely social reality” and so even less that the “matter” (Marx’s term) which forms its substance can be decided or changed by a vote.
“You have been making out that the landowners were feudals”
“According to you, the “feudal” landlords should have all been on the king’s side.“
I don’t know who this is addressed to but it can’t be me as I have never said that. In fact I have argued here the exact opposite— that the landlords created by the dissolution of the monasteries were not feudal barons.
My argument has been that they were a landowning class who lived off the ground rent paid by their tenants who were producing for the market for profit (as noted by Adam Smith in the 18th century). In other words, that they were not bourgeois in the sense of a capitalist living off profits. Even so, they were just as opposed to an absolutist state as the bourgeois and made common cause with them against it.
In fact they benefitted as much from 1688 as the bourgeoisie, especially as they got to fill the top posts in the government for the next two hundred years.
More broadly, I have agreed with you that capitalism existed before the bourgeoisie won political control. Of course it did, otherwise they would have had no economic basis and in fact would not have existed. I can even agree with you that capitalism developed after feudalism under the absolutist state. However, that state had to be overthrown because in the end it became a barrier to the further development of capitalism. Hence the English Civil War and English Revolution considered in 1688.
You seem, TM, to want to have it both ways. On the one hand, you point out (correctly) that the landowning class created by Henry VIII were not feudal barons but ordinary “bourgeois” property owners (in the sense that their property rights were no different from owners of other property than land). On the other hand, you point to them (despite being painted by Van Dyck) as supporters of Parliament as evidence that the overthrow of the king was not a bourgeois revolution.
Marx was writing about the Glorious Revolution of 1688 but the course of events since the 1640s was the same as that of other political revolutions. The revolutionists win political power and the moderates are satisfied; another section wants to go further and does but are themselves overthrown, and the result is that the moderates get their way. As Marx pointed out, the landowning class had no more interest in there being an absolutist state than had the bourgeoisie and so supported a political revolution to overthrow it. Later, a conflict of interest developed between them and the factory owning capitalist class but that’s another history.
Bear in mind that the difference in time between the execution of the king in 1649 and 1688 is the same as the difference between 1981 and today with the English Republic being overthrow in 1992.
In 1850 Marx himself wrote an article on “England’s 17th century Revolution” in which the following passage occurs;
“For M. Guizot, the great mystery is the conservative nature of the English Revolution, which he can ascribe only to the superior intelligence of the English, whereas in fact it can be found in the enduring alliance between the bourgeoisie and a great part of the landowners, an alliance that constitutes the major difference between it and the French Revolution, which destroyed the great landholdings with its parcelization policy. The English class of great landowners, allied with the bourgeoisie — which, incidentally, had already developed under Henry VIII — did not find itself in opposition — as did the French feudal landowners in 1789 — but rather in complete harmony with the vital requirements of the bourgeoisie. In fact, their lands were not feudal but bourgeois property. On the one hand, there were able to provide the industrial bourgeoisie with the manpower necessary for manufacturing, and on the other they were able to develop agriculture to the standards consonant with industry and commerce. Thus their common interests with the bourgeoisie, thus their alliance with it.”
Dear Feudalism
I am afraid that you have misunderstood what we said about you. It was this:
“The modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune: here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie (…)
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.”
We are of course grateful to you for allowing capitalism and the capitalist class to develop within you, not that you could do anything about it.
Yours for the Socialist Revolution
Dr. K. Marx. F. Engels. 1848.
Who said that Habsburg Spain was a “feudal conglomeration”. It wasn’t me. I just said that it wasn’t a “nation-state”. Or do you think that pre-1917 Russia was a “feudal conglomeration”?
And how can there be a “nation”-state without the concept of a “nation” as a group with a common interest and destiny (even if this is only an ideology of a ruling class to gain consent its rule)?
Ok, the leaders of the Dutch and English Revolutions and their followers didn’t call themselves as “citizens”. That would be an anachronism (that’s why I put it in inverted commas). But they did, I think, regard themselves as something equivalent under a different name (against the Norman Yoke, etc).
Anyway, to talk of a “bourgeoisie” in England in the 17th century (or any century actually, as that’s never what the capitalist class in England and their predecessors called themselves) is also an anachronism as that too is taken from later French experience.
Ok, LBN, I can see what he’s done. He’s taken a concept originally intended to be about the social sciences, added plebiscitary democracy and extended it to the physical sciences — and ended up in a complete theoretical mess, inadvertently disproving his theory on the principle of reductio ad absurdum ie shoots himself in the foot.
What is annoying is that he drags in Marx who never dabbled in such ideas and attributes them to him.
I would have thought that in the period we are talking about Spain was a dynastic Empire (like Tsarist Russia later) rather than a capitalist nation-state (like post-Revolution France with “citizens” identifying themselves as a “nation”). Actually, the Dutch Republic or England would seem to qualify better as “the first capitalist nation-state”. Spain was a state that participated in the capitalist world-market but not as a “nation-state”.
“Habsburg Spain refers to Spain over the 16th and 17th centuries (1516–1700), when it was ruled by kings from the House of Habsburg (also associated with its role in the history of Central and Eastern Europe). The Habsburg rulers (chiefly Charles I and Philip II) reached the zenith of their influence and power. They controlled territory that included the Americas, the East Indies, the Low Countries, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, and territories now in France and Germany in Europe, the Portuguese Empire from 1580 to 1640, and various other territories such as small enclaves like Ceuta and Oran in North Africa. ” (Wikipedia)
The people living in these territories may well have regarded themselves as subjects of the King of Spain but hardly as members of a Spanish “nation”. In fact, I wonder to what extent those living in the Iberian peninsula would have done.
It does seem odd, TM, to describe the landlord class created by the dissolution of the monasteries, etc and whose descendants you say are still great landowners as a “rural bourgeoisie”. Of course they weren’t feudal barons but bourgeois? You know more about the period than me but did they farm their land directly or did they lease it out to tenant farmers?
“Oh, must have missed that book on poststructural thought- the Earth doth Stand Still- and the Sun Moves ‘Round it!”
You could be right, LB (Neil), that no postmodernist has explicitly stated that at one time the Sun moved round the Earth — though it has been expressed by you can guess who on this forum. It seems to derive from what critics of postmodernism concluded from the view put forward by that intellectual fraud (as are most modern French philosophers except those who are piss-takers), Foucault, that “truth is a manufactured belief”.
This article uses as an example how this could be used to argue that in 0 AD it was true that “the sun revolves around the earth” .
This one cites the postmodernist Steve Woolgar:
“Woolgar (1989) argues that scientists construct objects through their representations of them. Objects, according to Woolgar, whether they are countries or electrons, are socially constructed entities, and do not exist aside from this social construction. ”
and goes on to ask:
“Anyone who really thinks that “beliefs create reality” should be eager to explain how the real motions of all planets in the solar system changed from earth-centered orbits in 1500 (when this was believed by almost everyone) to sun-centered orbits in 1700 (when this was believed by almost all scientists). Did the change in beliefs (from theories of 1500 to theories of 1700) cause a change in reality (with planets beginning to orbit the sun at some time – but exactly when did this occur – between 1500 and 1700) ?”
I don’t think any postmodernist has taken up this challenge, though our feathered friend did a few years ago but I can’t remember what date he came up with, though he did say that at some later date it would be put to a vote of the whole adult human population as well as having the impudence to claim that this was Marx’s view too.
Ok but what about Alexander II who decreed the end of serfdom in Russia then, a precondition for the development of capitalism there? And of course capitalism did develop in Russia from that point to the extent that in 1899 Lenin could write a book about it.
I don’t think anyone denies that capitalism had to begin to have developed before a group emerged that aimed at winning control of political power to remove obstacles to the further development of capitalism. In fact part of the development of capitalism was to bring into being such a group. That’s part of the materialist conception of history.
I know we speak of the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, the Neolithic revolution, etc but this is to describe a complete change that took place over a longish period of time. The distinction you are drawing between “socio-economic revolution” and “political revolution ” is really a distinction between “socio-economic evolution” and “political revolution”.
”Revolution” in the political sense refers to a change in those who control political power and takes place fairly quickly in a relatively short period of time. Hence the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution (as they were known at the time), the Russian Revolution and, posthumously, the English Revolution.
I think Wez has a point when he says that, to refer to the longish period of socio-economic evolution that precedes and culminates in a political revolution as the revolution, gives credence to those who think that socialism could come into being gradually without the need for a political revolution (conscious capture of political power by a socialist-minded working class). Obviously this isn’t your view but how would you refute a gradualist reformist who did think this?
“Not all post moderns see matter as immaterial- as I said, I can stub my toe on it: and it hurts.“
That’s interesting (and reassuring — at least you’ve got your feet in the ground !). So some actually do see “matter” as a human creation. Do you know which one of them came up with the idea that the Sun moved round the Earth when that was the common view?
