Fetters on Production

[Catma]

I am very hazy on how capitalism transcended the fetters of the feudal system. This is probably because I don't have a good idea of how feudalism worked in the first place. What form did these fetters take? How did capitalism alleviate the problem?

Similarly, can anyone give a rundown of current fetters on production due to capitalism, that would be alleviated by a socialist system? Competition creates redundancy, for one... though I would hope there would remain some redundant production, as for example different varieties of consumer goods. Also, monopoly (or imperialist) capitalism doesn't really have much competition anyway. Economies of scale could make a nation-wide, or transnational system more efficient. I'd like more concrete information though.

[Blake's Baby]

OK; first of you need to consider what 'fetters' might be, and what they might be inhibiting.

Production under feudalism was not organised to turn in a profit. So it didn't produce commodities as such. It mostly produced necessities, that were directly consumed, and luxuries, that were also pretty much directly consumed (but only by a few). As long that was all there was... well, the aristos got gout and the peasants got starvation and the system pottered along.

What was being retarded was the ability of the burghers (=bourgeois, the merchant classes in the towns or 'burgs') to get their hands on lots of cash. They were trading in the small amounts of commodities that existed. In some places - eg England - capitalism began to devlop under royal patronage; in other places it more or less sprang up of its own accord (Italian city-states, German free cities etc).

But the organisation of feudal society itself was the 'fetter' to expanding production. Aristocratic control of landed estates meant that land was not so easy to exploitas a resource; the peasants had customary rights over it (eg 'the Commons') in return for which the lord expected customary dues (eg a certain amount of labour or a percentage of the crop or whatever). And there were few standards about weight, measures, time, taxes or any of that mallarky; everywhere had its own times and holidays and languages and systems of measurement and law codes and whatnot.

from a capitalist point of view this all very inefficient; much better to throw the peasants off the land, move in some sheep, and employ a couple of former peasnats as shepards. They won't ask for much in return, and if they do we can sack them and get in some of their unemployed former peasant colleagues.

So capitalism began the process of destroying the peasant communities, and concentrating not just wealth but capital in the hands of the new middle class of bourgeoises, who were also going about unifying countries, standardising measurement and time, language, law codes and much else. Capitalism saw itself as a natural, rational force against the obscurantism and localism of the Medieval period.

And it was; up to the point that it too became a social system that had outlived its rationale. Capitalism is capable of providing a standard of living for every person on the planet that would guarantee no-one starved or suffered from a preventable illness. But it won't - it can't - because it is based on the premise that some get massive rewards and most get next to nothing. The 'fetter' of capitalism is that effective (ie, economic) demand can never match real need; whereas production can far outstrip the ability of society to buy everything.

Production under capitalism becomes less and less efficient, meaning that capitalists must constantly revolutionise production or be forced out of business. Not to fulfill human needs, but to generate more profit - or any profit. So the system that started with the perspective of rationally organising production becomes a sysytem where production is only organissed (or indeed scrapped) in order to make money; a system whereby a bigger and bigger dog runs after a smaller and smaller tail in endless circles.

This is the ultimate fate of class societies, societies that depend on one class exploiting the labour of another. In capitalism the exploited class is the working class, the productive class, which associates togetherto produce the wealth of society. this is then expropriated by the owners of the means of production, the capitalist class. This is the main contradiction in the capitalist system, between the social production of wealth and its private expropriation. If all wealth was social, there would be no contradiction, the production and consumption of wealth would be harmoniously balanced, but it isn't so they aren't. And that stops us reaching our potential - it's the ultimate fetter on our ability to produce for the satisfaction of human needs.