Transition from
feudalism
The transition
from feudalism to capitalism is often viewed as the result of a gradual and
rising progress of technology, urbanisation, science and trade – inevitable
because humans have always possessed “the propensity to truck, barter and
exchange” (Adam Smith). However, as writers such as Ellen Meiksins Wood and
Robert Brenner have demonstrated, the rise of capitalism depended on very
specific and localised conditions and was the result of a process that was far
from automatic.
The relatively recent
change from a primarily agricultural society of petty producers to a society of
commodity production and market dependence required a change in the social
relations at the heart of society. The central relationship instead of being
between landlords and un-free peasants became one between capital-owners and
propertyless wage-labourers. Such a change could only be bought about by a
complete rupture with the old relations of human interaction.
By the 17th
century trade, mercantilism and money lending had grown and developed in Europe
but these by themselves did not undermine the foundations of feudal society.
The mere existence of commodity production, merchants’ capital and money
lenders capital are necessary but not sufficient conditions for the full
development of capitalism. “Or else ancient Rome, Byzantium etc. would have
ended their history with free labour and capital” (Karl Marx).
Only in England
were conditions right for the essential prerequisite to take hold, capitalist
relations in agriculture. The later industrial revolution would have been
extremely unlikely without an agricultural sector that was productive enough to
support it.
These changes can
be explained by looking for the ‘prime mover’ in society. In capitalist
societies this is the need to accumulate capital. In feudalism the need to
maintain class position takes this role.
In order to
maintain and improve their position as members of the ruling class and to
defend it against their rivals, their underlings and moneylenders, the pressure
was on feudal landlords to increase rents. In capitalism surplus wealth is
extracted through economic means; it is because of the market-dependency of the
wage-labourer that labour-power is sold. In feudal society, as the peasants
have their own means of production, surplus must be extracted via ‘extra-economic’
methods through the real or ultimate threat of force, which explains their
un-free status.
By the mid 15th
century through ongoing resistance and evasion the peasantry of much of western
Europe including England, were able to break the shackles of serfdom and gain
their freedom. This proved a problem for landlords as they could now no longer
depend on arbitrary peasant labour or duties and income from rents fixed
long-term by custom, the value of which tended to decrease in the face of rising
costs.
In order to
counter this tendency in England, more easily than in other western European
countries, landlords were able to appropriate peasant holdings that had became
vacant due to a falling population. These properties were able to be leased at
rates in excess of customary rent.
Another option
available to landlords was the imposition of fines and levies. Charges could be
made whenever land changed hands or was inherited and many landlords used these
as a method for removing customary peasants from their land so that competitive
commercial rents could be charged. However this process did not go on
unchallenged; widespread and fairly successful peasant uprisings were a
recurrent theme for much of the 15th century. This trend continued into the
16th century with security of tenure and the question of fines being core to
what became know as Kett’s rebellion of 1549. If successful such events may
have “clipped the wings of rural capitalism” (Stanley Bindhoff), but they were
not and by the end of the 17th century around 70-75 percent of cultivatable
land was under the control of English landlords.
In France the property
rights of peasants developed along a different line. The monarchical state had
evolved into an independent collector of tax and had the power to draw revenues
from the land; it had an interest in curbing the rents of landlords, so that
peasants could pay more in taxes. The state was thus in competition with the
lords for surplus peasant product and for this reason often intervened to
secure peasant freedoms and property. French landlords had a legal difficulty
in occupying vacant peasant lots and so the majority of the land remained under
customary rents. The state used peasant production as a direct source of
revenue and increased its power by intervening in matters between peasants and
landlords to guarantee the continuity of the system.
This can be contrasted
with the form of state that developed in England during the Tudor period
(1485-1603). Here monarchical centralisation was dependent on the support from
landlords, evident from the growth of parliamentary institutions of the period.
The weakness of the English peasantry deprived the monarchical powers of a
means of generating an income independently of landlords. Powerful elements of
the nobility and gentry would support the monarchy’s centralising efforts in
the hope of achieving the stability and order necessary for their own economic
growth. It was however these same elements from the landlord class who had the
strongest interest in freeing themselves from customary peasants and replacing
them with commercial tenants.
The nature of the two
different states can be illustrated by the content of peasant revolts in the
two countries. In England, revolts were directed against the landlords in an
attempt to protect peasant ownership against the encroachment of capitalistic
property relations. In France the crushing taxation of an absolutist state was
the source of the peasants’ grievances.
Market dependency
English landlords
controlled a large proportion of the best land but didn’t have, or need, the
kinds of extra-economic powers that other European feudal ruling classes
depended on. Instead they largely depended on the increasing productivity of
tenants and required the state only as a means of protecting their private
property and enforcing contractual obligations. In England, unlike anywhere
else, an increasing amount of rents took the form of economic leases being
fixed not by law or tradition but variably priced according to market
conditions. For tenants this meant having to respond to market imperatives and
taking an interest in agricultural ‘improvement’ and increasing productivity,
often involving enclosure of common lands and increased exploitation of wage
labour. Both producers and landowners were becoming dependent on the market for
their own self-reproduction.
Market imperatives
rather than market opportunities were the driving force of the process. Tenant
farmers were specialising in competitive production for the market because they
needed to in order to be able to continue leasing. This can be contrasted with
the peasant who may have had the opportunity to sell surplus product on the
market but, as they owned their own means of subsistence, was in no way
dependent on it.
Peasants who were unable
to keep up with fines or tenants that failed to compete successfully were
pushed into a mere subsistence existence and eventually made landless. Some
became vagabonds, wandering the roads looking for food or others became wage
labourers on large farms. The landless became not only labourers but also
consumers as they needed to buy goods in the market which they had previously
been able to produce themselves. This was one of the reasons a healthy home
market was able to develop in England.
Until 1640 the state
operated in the interest of the old feudal order, restricting the full
development of capitalist relations in the countryside. During the turbulent
events of the English civil war the commercial classes, favouring capitalist
development against the traditional rights of peasants and monarchy, managed to
take hold of Parliament. The rate of change now rapidly accelerated with the
‘improving’ capitalist tenant farmer becoming typical by 1660. State-sponsored
enclosure of common lands increased and became commonplace, forcing more and
more peasants into becoming landless wage-labourers.
The emergence of the
landlord/capitalist tenant/wage-labourer triad made the agricultural revolution
possible and laid the groundwork for the industrial revolution. Growing agricultural
production provided rising incomes for not only the middle but the lower
classes, fuelling the growth of the home market. “Industry fed on agriculture
and stimulated in turn further agricultural improvement – an upward spiral that
extended into the industrial revolution” (Robert Brenner)
Worldwide market
Once English
capitalism reached its industrial phase the world-wide market with its
competitive pressures became the means for the spreading of capitalist social
relations. Economies that depended on trade would be subject to the market
imperatives of competition and increasing productivity. These market
imperatives transformed social property relations leading to a new wave of
dispossession and commodification of labour-power, both small agricultural and
independent industrial producers faced the same fate. As more and more people
were brought under the sphere of market dependence the strengths of these
imperatives grew. Capital was able to remake the world in its own image.
The social changes of
the 17th century freed technology and science from the shackles of feudal
backwardness, making possible the advances that began in the 18th century. Yet
the direction of technological development is dictated by the profit motive,
the need to accumulate capital for its own sake. Could the 21st century see a
further period of social change, where humanity as a whole takes control of the
productive powers and where human need becomes the guiding force for a new age
of technological and scientific progress?
By studying
capitalism we learn that human society is not the result of some eternal logic
or divine laws but is created through our own actions as we produce the things
we need and use every day. The historical conditions that set in motion the
social changes that have transformed the world were in no way inevitable. We
must fully understand the full power of market imperatives, of the need to
accumulate capital and of the need to raise the productivity of labour. We must
also have a clear idea of their origins. Once we can begin to answer how and
why society works in the way it does we are already some way towards
understanding what could be done to change it.
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