Young Master Smeet
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Re: Peasants, I’d invoke Hobsbawm, and the role of banditry as the basic mode of peasant revolt against their feudal lords (and and their replacement): the struggle between peasant and aristocrat was a struggle over moveable surplus, which cold be appropriated by either party.
Look at Chaucer (and also Langland): feudal ideology venerated the peasant and reviled the bourgeoisie (none of the middle class characters in Pilgrim’s Progress are sympathetic), and of course, the peasants would rise against usurers and lawyers as the hangers on and robbers associated with the great feudal magnates, while holding on to the idea of papa tsar (or local equivalents): “If only the King knew of the abuses”, etc.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/10/britain-end-history
A fascinating article, which I think says a lot about where Britain is now: German reunification and a unified Europe has left Britain out in the cold: the French thought they could use Europe to ensnare Germany, but in the end, is this the German century?
Will Britain pivot to Russia after Brexit? After all, the 19th C. also saw Britain trying to use Russia to contain and counter Germany …
A blog post suggesting this discussion may be more relevant than it thinks:
https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2020/10/on-feudal-exploitation.html
Of course, we do have a talk on this sort of subject:
https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Ye-Olde-Worlde-Revolution-pt.1.mp3
Part of the issue is the situational logic. Someone once pointed out to me that when England and Portugal made their trade agreement, instead of investing their side of the profits, the Portuguese lords built cathedrals. They didn’t engage in productive accumulation (though in plenty of extractive accumulation). So, latter day while lords who squandered their rents on gaming and gambling could hardly be said to like their puritanical bourgeois partners who did forego, invest and expand their wealth.
The legal superstructure is not insignificant, but the real basis remains the thing we look to. feudalism was characterised by surplus extraction (even if this took the form by the 13th C. of money payments) rather than surplus value. A lordling collecting rents from his tenants may well be collecting surplus value (if the tenants employ waged labourers, but even into the 20th C. there were barriers to the agricultural labour market that meant custom and tradition were as important – if not more so – than market forces) but that would be indirect (in England).
The status of the king had no bearing on whether the system was feudal or not. The only thing stopping absolutism was the real practical power of the barons. Yes, the move from Edward I onwards was to rely on paid mercenaries (which very much drove forward the commodification of society), rather than feudal levies, but the King remained a feudal ruler.
We can look at Henry’s relations to St. Thomas More: he didn’t pay the saint a salary, he gave him manors (and an allocation of pigs, swans, wine, etc), from which he derived income (and accrued rights and obligations).
Even when the landowners changed from extracting surplus to extracting surplus value, through their rents, they still considered themselves to be behaving as before, the aristocratic owners of land, land which conferred status and a network of personal relations, rather than commercial ones.
The dissolution of the monasteries did allow a lot of new land owners, and land became alienable (after all, Richard II, when he was Duke of York had to prove he was the legitimate heir when he engaged in lawfare to seize manors, he couldn’t just buy them). And the owners of this new land sought to have the same status as the older aristos (which was one point of contention).
We can imagine the thought experiment: suppose after the world revolution the infamous capitalist island still existed, receiving goods from the socialist society (as an externality) which they don’t need to pay for, but which they trade among themselves. They would remain capitalists, even if the world hegemonic economic mode were socialist.
There is a space there for a critique of imperialism, if only acknowledging that Britain, the US (& France) ae punching above their economic weight and gaining commercial advantage through the levels of the world system and force of arms…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-53660052
“Gold has topped $2,000 (£1,527) an ounce for the first time as traders look for havens amid the pandemic.
Investors have moved cash into the precious metal as Covid-19 cases rise in the US and more money is pumped into the global economy.”
I missed the current tribulations in France:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52721153
”
<p class=”story-body__introduction”>The party of French President Emmanuel Macron has lost its outright majority in parliament, after a group of MPs broke away to form a new party.</p>
Ecology, Democracy, Solidarity will be largely formed of seven MPs from La République en Marche (On the Move) and other ex-supporters of the president.”What is the French for Greenwashing?
“Now a small country like Israel control the whole world and that the Zionist-controlled all the countries of the world, it is known that the main actor is Rothschild and the Illuminati”
Sorry, are you asserting this, or giving it as an example of a conspiracy theory?
With defund the police being an issue in protest this comment seems pertinent:
https://twitter.com/haymarketbooks/status/1273239039227965440
(Part of a longer lecture which sounds interesting, one of the participants is an author who notes it was the liberals who built the federal prison system into the monster it is, not had time to watch in full).
Nixon strategically changed that when he went for the Southern Strategy to pick up white racist voters in the south, where the likes of Wallace and Byrd were considered progressive democrats…
The start of the Seattle Commune?
https://twitter.com/BRRN_Fed/status/1270345660617891842
The barricades are up around a 6 block zone, calling itself autonomous…
