A question about historical materialism...

[Durruti's Ghost]

What are the key differences distinguishing slave society from feudal society? Examples of each in non-European settings would be welcomed as well. (For example, was the Aztec Empire a slave society or a feudal society? What about the various Chinese dynasties?)

[chegitz guevara]

The key difference is in slavery, the worker (slave) is owned by the master. In feudalism, the worker (serf) is tied to the land, but he is not owned. The land is owned and can be transferred, but the serf has rights. Slaves generally don't.

Also, Marx's stated categories should only be understood for Western Europe and the Near East/North Africa. They do not easily fit on other societies, with Japan being an exception. This isn't to say class society didn't exist elsewhere, just that different dynamics were involved, and one shouldn't simply take one category and try and force a different historical mode into it.

[New Tet]

Most of what I've read about the period (largely Eurocentric versions) argues that Aztec society, at the time of the Spanish invasion, was in the latter part of a transitional stage between tribal and ancient society.

IOW, an equivalent European date would put the Aztecs at around 752 B.C., or the founding of Rome.

For the Spaniards who first set foot on this 'new' continent it must have seemed like they were travelling back in time.

[Durruti's Ghost]

Did the ruling class change during the transition from slave society to feudalism in a manner analogous to the overthrow of the landed nobility by the bourgeoisie?

[New Tet]

What are the key differences distinguishing slave society from feudal society?

I don't know that this is a key difference, but one distinction is that in slave society the slave could not have possession of any of the product of his labor but what his master gave him, whereas the serf was allowed to cultivate his own or a communal plot of land and appropriate the product of that labor.

Commonly, the serf lived within large extended families. All of whom that could, worked the land for their master and, by turns or on their free time, worked the communal plot.

It's definitely a more complex arrangement than the Slave/Master relationship of ancient times, wouldn't you agree?

[New Tet]

Did the ruling class change during the transition from slave society to feudalism in a manner analogous to the overthrow of the landed nobility by the bourgeoisie?

Of course! The transformation was/is mutual and syncretic, but not necessarily simultaneous and definitely not harmonious.

[Hit The North]

What is important is that the productive relations which sustains class rule is changed, not necessarily the personnel. So, for instance, large sections of the late-Feudal land owning classes in England transformed themselves in to capitalists. Land simply became capitalised, agricultural production became industrialised and agricultural labourers proletarianised and, of course, the coal mines were usually on someone's land.

[New Tet]

What is important is that the productive relations which sustains class rule is changed, not necessarily the personnel. So, for instance, large sections of the late-Feudal land owning classes in England transformed themselves in to capitalists. Land simply became capitalised, agricultural production became industrialised and agricultural labourers proletarianised and, of course, the coal mines were usually on someone's land.

But would capitalism have come about in that order had not European Feudalism (which was at its highest stage of development) "discovered", invaded and conquered America?

Makes history seem inevitable, no?

[Hit The North]

But would capitalism have come about in that order had not European Feudalism (which was at its highest stage of development) "discovered", invaded and conquered America?


This is how Marx and Engels put it the Communist Manifesto:


The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois...

We see, therefore, how 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(4): 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.

Makes history seem inevitable, no?
Only retrospectively (which, of course, is the only way we can view history).