Semi-feudalism?

[promethean]

Since the previous thread on this was overrun by a troll, here is a new thread on this.


Split from this (http://www.revleft.com/vb/trotskyists-revaluate-russian-t142628/index4.html?t=142628&page=4) discussion.



I'm not too sure, but I think the member whom S Artesian was replying to probably believes that feudalism does exist in certain countries where capitalism is not fully developed. (I hope I have understood these two systems of exploitation accurately enough).

Feudal exploitation is based on landlords extracting surplus of peasants produce from lands which the peasants have partial or no ownership over.

Capitalist exploitation is based on capitalists extracting surplus from commodity production by workers.



Feudal relations and capitalist relations can co-exist, dominating in different geographic areas, within the borders of one country.

There are large areas of the world where capitalism has barely made itself felt, where people still scratch at the dirt with wood and metal to survive and pay portions of their harvest to the landlords. Even if capitalism defines the state which exercises dominion over this particular nation, even if there are massive industrial cities where capitalist relations rule, fundamentally feudal relations of exploitation can still exist in the backward rural areas.

When communists talk about semi-feudal, semi-colonial nations that is what is meant.

There was a very interesting discussion of this question at Kasama not so long ago:

http://kasamaproject.org/2010/08/31/sketches-over-rural-exploitation-capitalist-feudal-or-slave/

The comments are as worth reading as the article above them.


Can you give some examples? Where capitalism has barely made itself felt? Where the world market doesn't "make itself felt"?


The peasant villages of Nepal's Western hills.


And rural India, Pakistan, Bangladesh as per my experience and also some places of Africa and Asia as per my knowledge. I can guess that people like S.Artesian just go there and found that those people have cable TV, cellphone and some other modern electronic equipment and from that concluded that it's totally capitalism. I just want to remind that capitalism isn't equivalent to some electronic gadgets, it stays on the society. And until and unless the you can understand the society and social relations properly, you will see the flags of capitalism everywhere with the electronic and other gadgets.


Most people in these areas don't even have access to clean drinking water or basic roads, let alone cable TV! Although obviously that differs from area to area.


Feudalism doesn't exist anymore. Semi-feudalism still does.


That kind of proves the point, no? The peasant villages of a part of Nepal? Does that peasantry produce a surplus? Is that surplus exchanged? Does that exchange involve urban areas, international areas? Do those urban areas interact with world markets?

I'm sure there are isolated villages that have no external contact, period. There are indigenous people that have no external contact... except they do, as capitalism expands around them, shrinking the indigenous areas, reducing flora and fauna necessary for the subsistence of these people.


Try not distorting what I've written. I said "uneven and combined" development. Get that? Uneven and combined. Backward and advanced. Cell phones in India used to check market prices in London, New York, Mumbai by fisherman using wind powered vessels and small nets.

Debt peonage agriculture, driving living standards of the producer below subsistence levels, with the agricultural product being traded on world markets.

Advanced automobile factories, mines, electronic component assembly plants combined with declining productivity in agriculture.

That's what I said. Try sticking to what is written, not what you need to distort.... or make up.

I think because Mao believed certain countries to be semi-feudal, he called for New Democratic revolutions as the first stage in the socialist revolution. So before we dismiss New Democracy or related concepts, we need to understand what is meant by semi-feudalism.

Feudalism is characterised by landlords extracting portions of the produce of the peasantry. If such a thing still occurs in a country, can it be called semi-feudal? Also what does it mean for a country to be semi-feudal?

[penguinfoot]

Feudalism is characterised by landlords extracting portions of the produce of the peasantry.

There's nothing inherently feudal about this type of arrangement. It's quite possible that you could have a group of producers who rent land off a large landowner and pay the rent in cash, this cash being generated through the sale of the goods that they produce as commodities - it is unlikely that you would get an arrangement of this kind over the long term in a capitalist economy because the development of capitalism involves an increasingly unequal distribution of land whereby small farmers find that they can no longer gain sufficient revenue from the sale of their produce (sufficient to maintain the condition of being an independent farmer) at the same time as not being able to afford the inputs that make farming on a large scale possible, but we need to keep in mind that what is distinctive about feudalism is not that land is the most important means of production or that the majority of the population lives in the land but that labour power and land have not yet become alienable and that goods continue to be produced for the purpose of use rather than exchange. If the producers did not exercise full control over their labour power in that they were forced to work for a number of days each year on the land of the local member of the ruling class and paid that same member of the ruling class in kind rather than in cash then that would be an instance of feudalism because it would be impossible for labour power to exist as a commodity under that arrangement. It is with the transition to capitalism that labour power becomes a commodity, which is why capitalism is defined as a system of generalized commodity production.

Incidentally, in China the countryside was characterized by a definitive move away from payment in kind by the first decades of the twentieth century, either in the form of sharecropping or fixed-term rents, so that the payment of cash rents had become the only or at least the predominant form of payment - what often happened once cash rents had become established is that tenants would make a deposit as soon as they agreed a rental between themselves and the local landowner and would pay the balance shortly before they began to use the land, towards the end of the year preceding the year in which the land would be used, with the size of the rents themselves being directly tied to price movements and the dictates of supply and demand, so that, when prices increased, often as a consequence of international events, there was a tendency for the landlords to raise rents in order to keep up, and when the demand for rentals exceeded the supply, some landlords were prepared to bump one tenant for another in order to receive a higher rent – as such there was a much more rapid turnover in land rentals than previously when sharecropping and payment of fixed rents in kind were more common, which became even more rapid as a result of wartime inflation, with villagers developing the term “duanqian” to describe the practice of tenant bumping in their communities.

In addition, there was a movement away from serfdom and towards wage-labour in the countryside much earlier than in most European contexts so that the transition was well under way during the Ming and the Qing, and during the early twentieth century this transition became even more marked insofar as some of the features that had previously obscured the nature of wage-labour in the countryside and created the illusion of a community of interests between the employer and his workers were eliminated - whereas it had previously been common for employers to provide a special meal with treats such as wheat-flour buns and wine for new workers, with a similar treat being given after the harvest, and employers also giving labourers envelopes containing between three and five yuan around New Year, what you had by the 1930s was a system of wage-labour contracts which were generally for only one year and were reached verbally through a middle-man, to the extent that countryside dwellers came up with the new term “niangong” to describe agricultural wage laborers - nian and gong being the Chinese words for year and work/worker respectively. There was really nothing feudal about China during this period, even if there had been at some point.

[penguinfoot]

I believe this exists in many countries today.

Go on then, name them. The very fact that countries like India (which is naturally one of the countries which Maoists think is semi-feudal) have witnessed such high levels of rural-urban migration is itself evidence that there is nothing feudal about these countries because producers being able to move around countries at will or indeed move between countries as is increasingly common for some sections of the workforce presupposes that they are not tied to the land and that their labour power has become alienable.

[penguinfoot]

Incidentally, a relevant quote, from the Grundrisse:

"The fact that we now not only call the plantation owners in America capitalists, but that they are capitalists, is based on their existence as anomalies within a world market based on free labour."

Marx is open to the possibility of there being pre-capitalist social forms existing within a capitalist economy as this is also something he introduces in Poverty of Philosophy but he insists that this does not change the overall character of the economy as capitalist - this reference is to slavery probably because there were no empirical cases of feudalism existing in the advanced countries with which Marx was most familiar and also because whether terms are like feudalism have ever been applicable to more than a small range of societies is a matter of controversy, but I see no reason why Marx or anyone else would believe that entire societies are semi-feudal in the event that they display marginal instances of feudal relations of production within their borders. Of course, noone has yet provided any examples of even these marginal instances, so...