Historical materialist view on the Dark Ages.

[L.A.P.]

The transition between the classical antiquity and the middle ages is usually seen as decline in human civilization. However, the time of classical antiquity to the dark ages signifies the transition of slave society to feudalism, and the transition from feudalism to capitalism is a revolutionary and positive thing according to Marx. Therefore I'm guessing the abolishment of slave society to feudalism would also be a revolutionary positive thing, so wouldn't a historical materialist analysis go against the view point that the dark ages were a step backward from classical antiquity?

[Dumb]

I'm no expert on the history of that era, but my understanding is that the term "Dark Ages" was coined by a reactionary writer living in that era himself who idealized classical antiquity, seeing his own era as a regrettable backslide away from the ancient Greeks and Romans.

[bailey_187]

Feudalism didnt spring out of slavery straight away. Much of North Western Europe saw a near complete collapse in the state, economy, reduction of towns etc and was constantly plagued by invasions from 'Barbarians'. However, some of the Roman estates survived and were self-sufficient though.

According to my World Histories lecturer, Feudalism rose out of this period of chaos, as the break up of the economy, loss of state control etc made it hard to raise an army, while the inability to raise an army meant less state control and worse economic decline. So land was given away to lords or whatever, who guarenteed their services in battle when the King required it. And this land was allowed to be farmed by peasents in return for rent etc

Thats what i have written in my notes, but there kind of incoherent and badly written, so i dno. But what i gather from that and i remember, is that after the collapse of Rome and great "Barbarian invasions", there was a "Dark Ages", in that towns dissapeard, the advanced institutions of the Roman state collapsed, infastructure fell into disrepair, money ceased to be used, literacy decline etc, but the Fuedal sytem grew out of this chaos, provided some stability, and brought some progress back to Europe e.g. growth of towns in the IIRC 13th century, growth of education, economy

[Tim Finnegan]

I'm no expert on the history of that era, but my understanding is that the term "Dark Ages" was coined by a reactionary writer living in that era himself who idealized classical antiquity, seeing his own era as a regrettable backslide away from the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Almost, but not quite. It was coined in the Renaissance by neo-classicalists, who styled themselves as bringing Europe out of the "darkness" of the Medieval period and into the "light" of a revived Classical civilisation. The emergence of Victorian mediaevalism pushed the boundaries of the so-called "dark age" back to the Early Middle Ages- around 500 to 1000AD, and is occasionally pushed back on the near end to around 800AD, in acknowledgement of the Carolingian Renaissance.


Feudalism didnt spring out of slavery straight away. Much of North Western Europe saw a near complete collapse in the state, economy, reduction of towns etc and was constantly plagued by invasions from 'Barbarians'. However, some of the Roman estates survived and were self-sufficient though.

According to my World Histories lecturer, Feudalism rose out of this period of chaos, as the break up of the economy, loss of state control etc made it hard to raise an army, while the inability to raise an army meant less state control and worse economic decline. So land was given away to lords or whatever, who guarenteed their services in battle when the King required it. And this land was allowed to be farmed by peasents in return for rent etc
In this sense, "feudalism" refers to the social-political system of monarchical vassalage, which emerged out of the collapse of the Carolingian Empire- the first major attempt to advance past the quasi-tribal political organisation of the Early Middle Ages- rather than to the economic system as referred to by the same label in Marxist thought. That emerged earlier, its first seeds sprouting in the Late Roman period as slave latifunda were broken up broken up by their owners into individual plots worked by tenants, a reaction to three major factors: the difficulty of managing large slave-estates effectively, a stagnating slave trade and population, an increasing burden of landless plebsians (proletarii). This was kicked into overdrive when the imperial system collapsed, both because that meant the final collapse of a large-scale slave trade and thus effective mass slavery, and also the increased dependence of commoners on the aristocracy for military protection. Many of the early feudal lords were not, in fact, barbarians chieftains, but Roman governors who had been isolated from the centres of imperial power.

This development was mirrored later in the East, where it had held off by the retention of both a mass slave trade and an imperial state, which suggests that it is one of the natural routes by which the contradictions of a classical slave society- the "Antique Mode of Production", as Marx called it- can resolve themselves.

[Blake's Baby]

EDIT: I was posting at the same as Tim, and I agree muchly with what he has to say.

It's a very complex subject, but in essence, Bailey is along the right lines in my opinion. 'Feudalism' as a generalised system only really comes to dominate from the 800s onwards in Western Europe, and Classical Antiquity disintergrates (in the West) between (let's say) AD400-500. It doesn't in the Eastern Empire, it morphs into something else that increasingly resembles feudalism. But there's a good couple of hundred years of hiatus between a stable 'Classical Antiquity' and a stable 'Feudalism'.

That doesn't negate historical materialism. It just means history is messy. The rising class of Feudal lords didn't take the Roman Empire down on November 7th (Julian Calander, of course) AD417. Revolutions in history don't happen like that. Class struggle in Ancient Rome was between Patricians and Slaves, but the end of the Classical world didn't see slave republics established; the slaves never overthrew the social order, and eventually the Equites class (merged with the 'barbarian' tribal warlords, and morphed into the new feudal aristocracy) supplied a new social/economic dynamic for Europe. This is a major difference between ealier revolutions and the proletarian revolution. The slaves were an exploited class, but not a revolutionary class, in a historical-materialist sense. They don't embody a new society, unlike the proletariat. The Equites (knights) do embody a new society, feudal society. They are the solution to the historic problem of the slave-economy of Ancient Rome. But they can't immediately organise society as they'd wish, partly because Roman society was really messy. It's hard to keep cities going when your means of production is basically military exploitation of subsistence agriculture with little economic infrastructure.

Anyway. I said it was complex and I was going to be brief. Sorry, I was wrong. But there's so much to unpack from the end of Classical Antiquity, as soon as you pull at one bit, the whole lot unravels.