Let's talk about feudalism, yo

[Illegalitarian]

Knights in shining armor, samurais v. ninjas, all of the sneaky maneuvering and backstabbing among the nobility. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.


On a serious note, Feudalism, as a mode of production, its specific social relations, its origins, the material conditions that gave way to its rise, isn't much talked about by the left it would seem. Of course, it's history that doesn't have any relevance today aside from its symbolic vestiges in parts of Europe, so there is no real reason for there to be much history of it out there from a marxist perspective, but that doesn't keep it from being terribly, terribly interesting, now does it?

I think the most interesting thing here is that it isn't quite as simply defined as capitalism. Capitalism is characterized by generalized commodity production through wage labor, as someone recently put it in another thread so eloquently, so it's easy to look and see what is and isn't capitalism, but feudalism isn't so easy to peg, it seems.

Feudalism took on different characteristics in Japan, in China, in Europe, etc, and looked different in all of these places when it first came to be than when it was at its peak (for example, it was sort of a bottom-up system popped up by the warrior class in the early days, but seems to have become more centralized around monarchy in its prime)

So, to you, what are the defining characteristics of feudalism on the whole, as a mode of production?

What were its defining social relations and how were they dismantled and replaced?

What particular events or conditions marked its decline, and what was the "it factor" so to speak that finally caused its rather violent end in places like France, England, Russia, etc?

Do its vestiges still loom in a relevant way in the regions it once dominated?

From the reign of terror, to the English civil war and the destruction of Catholics by Cromwell, to the resistance faced by the warrior class to the changes to the superstructure capitalism was making in Japan, and even arguably to the terror of the early USSR and the purges in China, it seems that feudal relations were always ended in a pretty violent way that ended in a lot of deaths (I'm not speaking to the characteristics of those deaths, just that they happened). Do you think that these periods of radical social unrest which lead to such mass deaths had anything to do with some sort of fundamental characteristic of the transition from feudalism to capitalism? Or is this perhaps the nature of revolutionary change in general, when it comes to shifting modes of production and the abolition of existing social relations, being replaced by the new?

I'm also curious, especially in the case of France and England, how bourgeois movements started in the first place since there was such a lack of bourgeois there.


Just asking questions and bouncing ideas off of you fine chaps, really. Any input would be appreciated.

[tuwix]

Feudalism was fighting very long time against primitive communism and in some cases has never won. Probable beginning of feudalism was in the middle east. Sumer and Mesopotamia are the first known in writings places where was monarch and everything was his property.

For me the most interesting is the process of transformation for primitive communism to feudalism. The most basic description of such transformation were equivalents of present gangs who imposed rackets on people and call themselves kings, princes, emperors, etc. But where they come from? Likely tensions between tribes enforced a need to have warriors and commanders. Those warriors in some time had to be professionals. And they had to be maintained.

And the key point of feudalism emergence is when commander doesn't want to be maintained by voluntary contribution but he starts to get it by force. Now he starts to won everything what is below him.

[Dodo]

Feudalism and emergence of capitalism had been thoroughly dealt with in the 60s-70s...we also debated it here a lot.
The big problem is to "identify" feudalism and "capitalism". We use these words pretty liberally generally.

There are many different opinions, but I can guide to you to some names if you wish;

Robert Brenner and E.Meiksin Wood, Wallerstein and the other intellectuals involved in the famous "Brenner Debate" (rooted in Maurice Dobb and Sweezy's) debates

You can read some Marxist historians like Neil Faulkner or Chris Harman, their references can guide you to other names as well.
There are still academics that deal with this that I had not read yet, but I am curious about Jairus Banaji as he seems to have dealt with this extensively(gathered many articles by him already)

The big questions are:

*an obsolete question which a mechanical marxist would obsess with; is feudalism a "stage" that we have to go through
*did capitalism originate in country-side(landowners turning capitalist like in England) or in the cities and is basically a representation of expanding metropole?
*where did capitalism emerge, did feudal countries go through cycles or did it expand from one location?

[DDR]

I do belive it was Lenin who defined the feudal mode of production with 4 fundamental features:

1.- Dominion over natural economy
2.- Concesion of the means of production to the direct productor, and in particular the fixation of peasants to the land
3.- Extra-personal dependency of peasantry regarding the landowners (extra-economic coercion)
4.- A very rutinary and extraordinary low tech.



The big questions are:

*an obsolete question which a mechanical marxist would obsess with; is feudalism a "stage" that we have to go through
*did capitalism originate in country-side(landowners turning capitalist like in England) or in the cities and is basically a representation of expanding metropole?
*where did capitalism emerge, did feudal countries go through cycles or did it expand from one location?

I think that the main theory is that serf leave the contryside in order to be freed of itself from the feudal obligations. Since there's no land to plow in the cities the only way to make money is to open up a workshop or any other kind of bussines, in which the capitalist relations begin to appear.

That's why they are called the Burgeoise, Burguers, because the cities in order to acomodate more people grew into Bourgs. So the capitalist began to be developed in the cities.

[Dodo]

I do belive it was Lenin who defined the feudal mode of production with 4 fundamental features:

I think that the main theory is that serf leave the contryside in order to be freed of itself from the feudal obligations. Since there's no land to plow in the cities the only way to make money is to open up a workshop or any other kind of bussines, in which the capitalist relations begin to appear.

That's why they are called the Burgeoise, Burguers, because the cities in order to acomodate more people grew into Bourgs. So the capitalist began to be developed in the cities.

If it is due to labor migration to metropole, then what caused this process can be understood in terms of the landowner's transformation too. The enclosures, efficiency investments and the the increase of "market attitude" among landowners can be the reason of this transformation.

Alternatively, it could be the rising trade and socio-political conjucture that favored the hand of burghers that accumulated more and more capital.

there are fierce debates over this with better data, and since I never finished reading all the works I kind of stopped thinking about this for a while.

[Rafiq]

Feudalism originated following the collapse of slave societies - the Roman empire (feudalism in pertinence to the historical development of capitalism). The development of capitalism, so it is argued, followed the black death and the rise of powerful mercantile classes which demanded a form of labor unbound by the countryside.

Did Marx and engels not detail this?

[Dodo]

they did, within their own knowledge of how things were...their views, while a base to move upon are obsolete on these matters. In the worst case scenario, highly euro-centric, and even then, quiet specific rather than having the notion of a "universal" theory.

Flow of history had not been identical everywhere, when we are referring to works of Marx&Engels, we can only consider them for the specific cases they deal with.
Besides, their concern was not to outline how things work but rather to show how it fits the whole political conjuncture of their creation. (nor they had time to and materials to look into this stuff thoroughly- as in, like everything else, capitalism induced academic division of labor had brought a whole lot more focused "knowledge" to the area long after their death)

[Illegalitarian]

Yeah, Marx certainly talked about it but I wouldn't say "in detail"

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Feudalism originated following the collapse of slave societies - the Roman empire (feudalism in pertinence to the historical development of capitalism). The development of capitalism, so it is argued, followed the black death and the rise of powerful mercantile classes which demanded a form of labor unbound by the countryside.

Did Marx and engels not detail this?

I don't know if Marx and Engels had the historical knowledge to compare the emergence of feudalism outside Europe (India and Japan, for instance) and inside Europe the way we do today.

[Speaks for the people]

Feudalism originated following the collapse of slave societies - the Roman empire (feudalism in pertinence to the historical development of capitalism). The development of capitalism, so it is argued, followed the black death and the rise of powerful mercantile classes which demanded a form of labor unbound by the countryside.

Did Marx and engels not detail this?

Feudalism, at least in Europe, was also defined as a "contract" society. Serf's became contract-bound to manors. Like all such contract arrangements, there was no equal bargaining power. Instead this involved thugs who use violence to control an essential resource (land), and then "allowed" those who formally lived in the commons to "use" what they used to collectively own. In essential ways, this form of "freedom", that is, the freedom to exploit others through a "contract society" is what right-wing style Libertarians dream about, and I like to refer to that ideology as Feudalism 2.0.

Real change in the human condition did become possible in part through democratization of violence. Throughout much of human history, military arts, for example, such as the sword, required many years of dedicated training to master. Peasants struggling to feed their families certainly did not have the means to do this.

The serfs were of course well aware of the true nature of their condition, perhaps much more so than the present working class seems to be. There were a number of mass peasant uprisings attempted in medieval Europe. Every last one of them failed and were put down, so often only requiring a relatively small mercenary force of knights. This was because the disparity of capability between those with dedicated martial skills wielding sophisticated weapons, and those that did not have either, were just too great to bridge, even with mass numbers. This of course all changed with the introduction of the gun.

The gun democratized military violence simply because, unlike the sword, the horse, etc, one could relatively easily master it "sufficiently", even on a part time basis, to still be effective, especially once enough guns were made for them to become abundant, and hence, why the industrial period in particular would see so much revolutionary action...

I think the first revolution that the gun likely changed an outcome was the English civil war, by better facilitating parliament and English round-heads to "collectively bargain" with then king Charles, eventually resulting in the fine practice of regicide that the French would later copy...

Eventually so many other revolutions would be led by the democratization of violence the gun offered, but this had numerous consequences. One of them was the state itself taking control of the gun and power of armed masses through mass conscription. It also tended to make all revolutions violent ones, as well as at times creating particularly violent cultures in it's wake and fostered a kind of mystic belief in the power of democratized violence that actually was never entirely true.

The most important consideration is that the power of the gun to liberate was entirely a temporary result in technological evolution. The idea of mass peasants effecting their conditions in this way has diminished as technological changes, such as the drone, of modern munitions, tanks, airplanes, and, ultimately, the nuclear bomb, again puts the balance of violence under the control of smaller highly trained forces able to terrorize and control much larger populations, no matter how many guns they may have.

The modern US 2nd ammendmentist, who are perhaps most deeply steeped in the fantasy of the power of the gun, does not realize that his true circumstances are becoming as irrelevant as that of the medieval peasant challenging barons, kinds, and feudal power with just pitchforks and their numbers. For this reason alone nobody wishes or needs to "take away" their guns. I also think we need to consider revolution in newer and different ways, as the era of democratized violence, even for it's positive as well as negative consequences, is ending.