What is the Anarchist answer to Feudalism?

[Broletariat]

I've seen how Marxist schools of thought view Capitalism as progressive over Feudalism, and in fact call it a necessary progression to Communism, along with Socialism. How do Anarchists feel about this though? Do they assert we could move from Feudalism directly to an Anarchistic society? Or is Anarchism an ideology only applicable under Capitalism?

[Blake's Baby]

An answer would be that some anarchists hold that in the end the revolution is a matter of will. The revolution has always been possible because in the end it's only our ideas (laws, language, conventions, religion etc) which imprison us. Guns and prisons certainly help but these are merely the tools that others use to impose their will and try to break our own. Capitalism is not necessary to human development, socialism (a free egalitarian society) could have existed in 1650 or 450, only the revolutionary will of the masses was lacking (probably due to religious mystifications, bad communications and other external problems).

Others believe that capitalism is a necessery pre-condition of socialism.

[mosfeld]

An answer would be that some anarchists hold that in the end the revolution is a matter of will. The revolution has always been possible because in the end it's only our ideas (laws, language, conventions, religion etc) which imprison us. Guns and prisons certainly help but these are merely the tools that others use to impose their will and try to break our own. Capitalism is not necessary to human development, socialism (a free egalitarian society) could have existed in 1650 or 450, only the revolutionary will of the masses was lacking (probably due to religious mystifications, bad communications and other external problems). So certain anarchists believe that you can not only jump from capitalism to communism, but from feudalism to communism? That just has to be the most ridiculous, unscientific and idealist conclusion I've heard, be it yours or not. Also, it's not "laws, religion.." etc that imprison us, it's ruling class exploitation of it's respective era. Laws, religion etc are a product of that exploitation to keep it intact.

[Broletariat]

So certain anarchists believe that you can not only jump from capitalism to communism, but from feudalism to communism? That just has to be the most ridiculous, unscientific and idealist conclusion I've heard, be it yours or not. Also, it's not "laws, religion.." etc that imprison us, it's ruling class exploitation of it's respective era. Laws, religion etc are a product of that exploitation to keep it intact.


Even if the conclusion is unsupported (as of yet) Would anyone care to attack it in specific and go into detail as to why, even if the people willed it to be, Communism could not exist right out of Feudalism? Or do the opposite like the OP asks and justify that type of thinking.

[cb9's_unity]

So certain anarchists believe that you can not only jump from capitalism to communism, but from feudalism to communism? That just has to be the most ridiculous, unscientific and idealist conclusion I've heard, be it yours or not. Also, it's not "laws, religion.." etc that imprison us, it's ruling class exploitation of it's respective era. Laws, religion etc are a product of that exploitation to keep it intact.

To my knowledge, Marx actually started considering the idea that the peasant communes in Russia could be used to go straight to communism. Though I could be completely wrong as I've only heard about this in passing.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Some anarchists (such as Berkman, for one) took the ideological line that if capitalism was such a dehumanizing and awful economic system, then it hardly seemed necessary to progress through it in order to get to communism...it other words, a rejection of the "you-gotta-go-through-hell-to-get-to-heaven" economic progression theory of traditional Marxism. I believe that Kropotkin also wrote of the "free cities" of the Middle Ages that managed to repel the royal armies in an approving light.

[Blake's Baby]

The argument about Marx and the Russian communes is a red herring. He didn't think capitalism as a stage could be bypassed, he just didn't think every territory necessarily had to go through a capitalist development. Europe became capitalist, and once there was 'enough' capitalism as a world system, even those places that weren't fully capitalist might be able to reach socialism if the revolution broke out in the more capitalistically-advanced countries.

EDIT: there seems to have been some pruning going on, which makes some of this superfluous... I'll try to keep the sense.

... Capitalism develops the productive forces, allowing the possibility of production that will satisfy human needs. The Middle Ages were in no way capable of delivering a satisfactory standard of living for the world's population, so socialising in 1650 would mean 'the socialisation of poverty' not the prospect of a society of plenty which capitalist development has left us.

Also, there was no socialised working class in 1650 (or in 450). Collective labour and private expropriation was organised very differently in the Middle Ages, and there was no workers' organisation that could promote communism, because without a working class as we recognise it today there could be no class consciousness as we know it. The revolution is about class struggle. Without the proletariat and its struggle against the bourgeoisie, there is no communism.

[ContrarianLemming]

Saying we can't live in communism after fuedalism is marxist dogma, Capitalism must come first! So Marx said!

an obseesion with all things worker brings this kind of thought, if theres no "class knowledge" and various other far left rhetoric then we cnat live in a classless society, so I wonder what what the north east native americans had.

[Blake's Baby]

Marx said it because he thought it was true, not "it's true because Marx said it". I wouldn't have liked to try and communalise the products and social capital of 1650AD or 450AD throughout the world. I don't believe that the economy, technology, or society as a whole were capable of socialism in earlier peoriods of human history, no matter how revolutionary some people might have been - and there were definitely revolutionary thinkers, writers, and fighters in earlier periods. But none of their revolutions could have produced world socialism.

Not sure what you're getting at with your comments about class society. We're not talking about living in any class society. Class societies have existed in various places since 5000BC at least, though in other places it seems non-class society existed much longer.

Class consciousness doesn't just refer to the working class; though when I used it above I was referring to the working class. But what I said was 'class consciousness as we know it' - other classes can have some sort of consciousness of what they are, but I was referring to the consciousness that working class has (or doesn't) of its role in capitalism. It is both the exploited class (the class whose existence underpins capitalism), and the revolutionary class (the class whose only hope for the future is the overthrow of the system).

[JacobVardy]

I'm pretty sure i've read both Kropotkin and Bakunin citing Siberian villages as part of their inspiration to anarchism.

Is a peasant communism possible? Certainly. Villages exchanging goods and services as and when needed between communities. There would be greater surpluses since they are no longer being extorted by the bandits-in-shining-armour. The Swiss held out pretty well in a bourgeois-peasant alliance against the nobility.

Is it likely? Not very. Even if the neighbouring rulers don't invade (and they always do in workers revolutions), the limits of Medieval technology would be against them. The cost in resources for transport is immense, and communication is really, really slow. The farming techniques of the middle ages left people a couple of bad seasons away from famine. So yes, its possible just not very likely as all those failed peasant revolts show.

[anticap]

This discussion will depend on one's definition of "communism." If we define it, in part, as a highly-developed civilization, then obviously those material conditions will have to be developed first. I do define it that way. Nevertheless, the argument, taken in isolation from its materialist foundations, stinks. It is logically no different from religious dogmas that admonish the faithful to stoically face the hardships of this life with the promise of paradise in the next.

Quite frankly, though I am a materialist, I am irritated by the apologetics sometimes made on materialist grounds, by members of certain Marxist tendencies, for undesirable states of affairs. Moreover, I have no patience for anyone who would discourage a people from exercising the self-determination to attempt "communism" [sic] at any point in their development. The conditions in which they will live, and their chances of success, are for them to accept or reject.

[Outinleftfield]

Socialism would be possible at any time, but not communism.

Socialism-the workers ownership of the means of production would be possible. There's no reason that any point in history had everyone decided that labor should be organized and run democratically that it wouldn't have worked. But we would not have had communism, because we still wouldn't have had enough resources for worldwide abundance. It still would have been better that resources would have been more equitably distributed and people would have been better off.

However, because of the lack of abundance people would've still been forced to compete so the most it would've amounted to would be some kind of peasant mutualism. Actual communism with free, spontaneous cooperation and no money would not have emerged right away. But we'd already be there today, because there would be no need for another revolution once the technology progressed enough to produce the necessary abundance.

[Dave B]

There has been a parallel debate on Licom.


http://libcom.org/forums/theory/socialist-bourgeois-revolution-03052010 (http://libcom.org/forums/theory/socialist-bourgeois-revolution-03052010)

On The Russian primitive communist peasants and the Mir system and going straight to communism etc the final word or analysis on the subject from Engels is best found below in the often cited by myself.



On Social Relations In Russia by Engels Afterword (1894)

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/01/russia.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/01/russia.htm)


Kautsky appears to comment on that below;

Karl Kautsky Differences Among the Russian Socialists (1905)





Twenty-four years ago no one could assert with certainty that the Russian village communities might not become the starting point of a modern form of communism. Society as a whole can not leap over any stage of evolution, but single backward portions thereof can easily do this. They can make a leap in order to correspond with other and more advanced portions.

So it was possible that Russian society might leap over the capitalist stage in order to immediately develop the new communism out of the old. But a condition of this was that socialism in the rest of Europe should become victorious during the time that the village communities still had a vital strength in Russia. This at the begin- fling of the eighties appeared still possible. But in a decade the impossibility of this transition was perfectly clear.

The revolution in Western Europe moved slower and the village communities in Russia fell faster than appeared probable at the beginning of the eighties, and therewith it was decided that the special peculiarity of Russia upon which the terrorism and the socialism of the Narodnaya Volya was founded should disappear, and that Russia must pass through capitalism in order to attain socialism and that also Russia must in this respect pass along the same road as had Western Europe. Here as there socialism must grow out of the great industry and the industrial proletariat is the only revolutionary class which is capable of leading a continuous and independent revolutionary battle against absolutism.



http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1905/xx/rsdlp.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1905/xx/rsdlp.htm)


Kropotkin also wrote some interesting stuff of the Mir system peasants in his mutual aid.


Not that I know that much about it I think one of the last places in the ‘modern’ world that that kind of system "sort of" operated was in Britain with Scottish clan system, in particular St Kilda that went on until 1930 when it was finally evacuated.

I seem to remember Kropotkin, writing obviously towards the end of his years, that he considered that the Bolshevik revolution was just a re-run of the French bourgeois/capitalist revolution.

Marx was obviously a materialist and that human ‘wills’ were subject to or based on material economic conditions as well.

Personally from an ‘irrational’ and confessional perspective I am a ‘humanist’ and like to think that underneath we are instinctively co-ooperative etc along the Kropotkins mutual aid lines and instinctively don’t like Karl’s brutal materialistic development of history perspective.

And that it would have nice if the Shaker and Winstanley communism could have developed along with a steady development of technology, means of production and potential abundance etc. But it didn’t and Karl and Fred said it wouldn’t and made a rational and as it turned out accurate idea as to why it wouldn’t.

Not that they had always strictly held that position, early on they did have some sympathy with Cabets Icarian movement for instance; setting up communist colonies.


Even if later they panned the idea in the communist manifesto.



.

[Broletariat]

I'm pretty sure i've read both Kropotkin and Bakunin citing Siberian villages as part of their inspiration to anarchism.

Is a peasant communism possible? Certainly. Villages exchanging goods and services as and when needed between communities. There would be greater surpluses since they are no longer being extorted by the bandits-in-shining-armour. The Swiss held out pretty well in a bourgeois-peasant alliance against the nobility.

Is it likely? Not very. Even if the neighbouring rulers don't invade (and they always do in workers revolutions), the limits of Medieval technology would be against them. The cost in resources for transport is immense, and communication is really, really slow. The farming techniques of the middle ages left people a couple of bad seasons away from famine. So yes, its possible just not very likely as all those failed peasant revolts show.


What exactly is your argument here? That a peasant commune would be unable to progress in sync with those around them? Why would you argue that exactly, my understanding is that a peasant commune and a communism today would operate on the same organisational principals, just with different material conditions so do correct me if I'm wrong.

[#FF0000]

What exactly is your argument here? That a peasant commune would be unable to progress in sync with those around them? Why would you argue that exactly, my understanding is that a peasant commune and a communism today would operate on the same organisational principals, just with different material conditions so do correct me if I'm wrong.

The thing is that out of industrialization came capitalism (of vice-versa?), and with that came the ability to produce ungodly amounts of shit. We're talking about thousands and maybe millions of times the amount of stuff that could have been produced under a feudal, agrarian economy.

But yeah out of all that it became way easier to meet people's needs because you could produce tons more with relatively little effort. Meanwhile a feudal society wouldn't have that. It might be the same organizational principles but the amount of effort to produce 1000 chairs under capitalism is much, much less than it is to produce 1000 chairs under feudalism.

[Broletariat]

The thing is that out of industrialization came capitalism (of vice-versa?), and with that came the ability to produce ungodly amounts of shit. We're talking about thousands and maybe millions of times the amount of stuff that could have been produced under a feudal, agrarian economy.

But yeah out of all that it became way easier to meet people's needs because you could produce tons more with relatively little effort. Meanwhile a feudal society wouldn't have that. It might be the same organizational principles but the amount of effort to produce 1000 chairs under capitalism is much, much less than it is to produce 1000 chairs under feudalism.

I suppose the spirit of my inquiry is. Why couldn't we have lived in those peasant communes until industrialisation happened and simply transitioned from there? Or was Capitalism necessary for Industrialisation and why?

[Blake's Baby]

Are you asking 'could medieval communes have developed socialism'?

Medieval 'communes' produced the bourgeoisie... they did develop production, and the necessary conditions of socialism, through the development of capitalism. They weren't peasant communes in France or Germany, they were the beginnings of bourgeois states. If you're asking 'why couldn't communism have started in ("backward") Russia' then the answer is ... how? How could peasant communities in Russia possibly have imposed their political and social revolution on all the most advanced countries of Europe?

You want industrialisation, but where does it come from? Only from the dispossession of the peasantry. Where then the peasant communes? If the peasants are still on the land, there's no proletariat, but then there's no capitalist development either. Capital is never accumulated and concentrated to produce (and more importantly generalise) water and steam power, build railways and sewerage systems, and give people wages in their pockets to buy all the goods that are never even produced...

[Durruti's Ghost]

I suppose the spirit of my inquiry is. Why couldn't we have lived in those peasant communes until industrialisation happened and simply transitioned from there? Or was Capitalism necessary for Industrialisation and why?

Capitalism certainly encourages industrialization. Owners of capital compete against each other. To do so, they must reinvest their profits back into their company rather than merely consuming it all for themselves; thus, instead of buying a ton of cool stuff, they buy something that helps them produce more efficiently. Thus, capitalist competition increases the strength of the productive forces, leading it to carry out the process of industrialization.

Now, could some sort of socialism have carried out a similar process without using competition as a primary driving force? Maybe, but it's hard to say for sure. (The often-brutal force required to carry out industrialization in the Soviet Union et al. is instructive, though.) We know capitalism could have because it did.

[Enragé]

A line from a book written by the CNT in 1936 'the economic organisation of the revolution', makes an interesting point.

You can be anarchist in extreme poverty, but to be communist you need abundance.

I think this has alot of truth to it, because if you have more than enough to keep yourself alive, you will be in the position to give up that 'more' to someone who does not have enough. Whereas, though you can live free and in defiance of authority and even create anarchist communities in severe poverty, you cannot share what you have for if you would you would die of starvation yourself.

As for 'the anarchist answer to fuedalism' as such, i think it would be the communalisation of lands in the hands of those who toiled on it and the abolition of the nobility. Whether this would be realistic, i dont know. I don't see a definite reason why not though. At the very least, it beats the shit out of accepting current conditions or putting an 'end' to the revolutionary process because of 'material conditions', e.g restricting the course of a revolution to a 'bourgeois' revolution or 'new democracy' beforehand. Why? Because that will ensure such a revolution will not succeed, simply because it inscribes into its banner that it will not.

[Psy]

I suppose the spirit of my inquiry is. Why couldn't we have lived in those peasant communes until industrialisation happened and simply transitioned from there? Or was Capitalism necessary for Industrialisation and why?
Because of the class system and their momentum moving them away from communism.

Think about why would a artisan want communism? Artisans smashed the machinery of the capitalists because they did not want it to compete with the capitalist's means of production as their class power came from scarcity of means of production.

Why would peasants want communism, for their entire lives they dreamed about just having a plot of land and left alone, they had no real desire to feed the other classes other in exchange for good and services.

Basically while a successful artisan revolution could have crushed feudalism and avoided capitalism it would not created a workers state same with a peasant revolution. Communism logically has to come from a proletariat revolution meaning you need proletariat meaning you need capitalists to exploit the proletariat to create the class relations that would propel the proletariat into not only revolution but communist revolution.

[ChrisK]

To my knowledge, Marx actually started considering the idea that the peasant communes in Russia could be used to go straight to communism. Though I could be completely wrong as I've only heard about this in passing.

Its in his later letters and his preface to the Russian version of the communist manifesto. He says that they can jump to communism only if the industrialized world also goes to communism and can thus industrialize the peasants. If anything this seems to be like Trotsky's Permanent Revolution.

He also argues that since Russia is already industrializing, this is actually unique to Russia and couldn't have happened in feudal europe.

Some links for you:
http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/preface.htm#preface-1882

http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/03/zasulich1.htm