Feudalism in Europe evolved unevenly, according to local conditions. In Western Europe, conditions in the North were more primitive than in the romanized South, but by the 7th century, both regions shared certain fundamental features. The feudal order was a patriarchal hierarchy, ruled by military and ecclesiastical elites, who lived upon the surplus produced by non-alienated peasant and artisan labor. Most artisans were also peasants. In the towns (which were still quite small), artisans grouped themselves into protective organizations, had access to raw materials from the countryside, and controlled the production of crafted items.  

Other than the enforced appropriation of a portion of the product of this labor (through rents, tithes, corvee labor, taxes, and share cropping arrangements), the medieval peasant and artisan controlled the what and how of producing the means of life, enjoying customary feudal rights to land, tools, and habitation. It was in the lord’s feudal interest that the peasant and artisan be able, independently, to produce and reproduce themselves. Medieval society reflected the culture and skills of the peasant and artisan, even when mediated by aristocratic and priestly ideology. Both priests and aristocrats relied on the labor of the common people for their food, clothing, tools, arms, and on other myriad craftsmen involved in the construction and furnishing of churches, manors, and castles. Until the 10th century, there were few merchants anywhere in Western Europe. Even in the romanized South--by the 8th century Abbasid Islam controlled the Mediterranean and the old trade routes--most production was for immediate use, not exchange. Money hardly figured into the lives of the vast majority of people, including the elite.

Islamic control of the Western Mediterranean slackened during the 10th century and Western European towns began to revive from the collapse of the Roman system (and the advent of Islamic power in the Mediterranean), first in Italy, and then in the Netherlands. The professional merchant--Italian, Greek, Jew, Syrian, Dutch--began to re-establish himself in the reviving towns. Merchant capitalists had a traditional role in ancient society. They bought and traded the the surplus product that the elite appropriated from the peasants, or bought and traded the goods produced by independently organized artisans. In ancient society, there were large market towns controlled by wealthy merchants. With the revival of trade, merchants performed the same role under feudal conditions. In Northern Italy, merchants took advantage of the political space created by conflicts between feuding lords, and formed independent city states like Venice and Ravenna. Northern trading and manufacturing towns followed in Ghent and Bruges in Flanders. These enclaves of merchants and organized craft workers fought against and allied themselves with one noble faction or another.   

By the 14th century, powerful, semi-independent city states existed in Italy and Flanders. (England and France lagged somewhat behind.) The great merchant capitalist/bankers of Venice, Florence, Ghent or London loaned money to kings and rebellious barons who bought arms and luxuries from other merchants who circulated this money by buying surplus product from landed aristocrats, trading them on the international market in return for more arms and exotic luxury goods and domestic crafts to sell back to aristocrats, who bought them on credit from merchant bankers. The result was the accumulating riches of the merchant bankers and the piling up of debt of the nobility. This debt could only be paid on the backs of the peasantry and the artisans of lesser guilds. 

 The merchant, operating within the pores of feudal society, became “richer than a lord.” Legally, however, merchants were of the 3rd estate, along with peasants, laborers, and vagabonds. Even the most powerful merchant risked the chance of debt repudiation and of being expelled (like 2000 Jews were from England by Edward I in 1290). He might also lose his head. Within their walled cities, merchants were still the legal subjects of the ruling landed aristocracy (in the personage of the baron, king, bishop, etc.). Under the feudal regime, land and title ruled, not money: the value of money depended on the needs of the the lord, his peasants, and the guilds, not on the market. The great mass of goods were still produced for need, only the surplus going to the merchant capitalist, who produced nothing himself and had little control over labor or land or the law. The richer the merchant, the greater his risk in the dangerously paradoxical symbiosis between himself and his indebted lord. It took centuries for merchant capitalism to gain control of feudalism. First the richest merchants bought feudal titles, then  some aristocratic landowners entered the market, and, eventually, so did the king and court--against the more conservative nobility. In the process social relations came to be mediated by money rather than feudal ties and customs--and peasants and artisans progressively lost control of the means of production and of their own lives.  

England is the classic example of the dialectical process of attraction and repulsion between the bourgeois and the aristocrat that destroyed the feudal order, which resulted in the primitive accumulation of a critical mass of uprooted peasants and artisans for the earliest “satanic mills” of merchant-controlled factories and nascent industrial enterprises. We’ll take up this dialectical process in more detail in the next post.

Primitive Accumulation, part 2

Marxists like to refer to the contradictions within the capitalist mode of private production for profit in order to show why it succumbs regularly to crises. I’ll do that too, in my last post of this attempt to explain basic marxism when I deal with the labor theory of value. But if one views capitalism as a social system that must produce and reproduce both its mode of production and its socially necessary work force, capitalism’s contradictions are so fundamentally destructive to that very purpose that one wonders how such a system could have evolved and managed to survive for almost 300 years--almost 200 years since the establishment of hegemonic (industrial) capitalism in mid-19th century England. 

Of course, the most fundamental of all of capitalism’s contradictions is that its privately owned and controlled system of production is necessarily structured (juridically and culturally) to oppose any needs (i.e. social needs, ecological needs) that might hamper its exclusive goal of private profit and the accumulation of personal wealth. Yet capitalism--ideology aside--is not just a system for the production of private wealth. Like all historical social systems, capitalism must satisfy the natural necessity of producing and reproducing all its necessary components--especially the one critical component that concerns us here: what Marx called the primitive accumulation of a permanent reserve army of the unemployed (and the precariously employed) which creates a general sense of social insecurity in the working population. As a matter of fact, for many spokespersons of the capitalist system, from Edmund Burke to Margaret Thatcher, there is no such thing as “society”. Whenever capitalism’s political personifications have been forced (by fear of the working population) to address the myriad social problems capitalism creates, they do so half-heartedly and temporarily, until even that effort seems to them to endanger profits and/or bourgeois political control. Crises, austerity, and wars seem to be capitalism’s “solutions” to its basic social contradictions. 

When we turn to Marx’s labor theory of value we will see how the contradictions  specific to the capitalist mode of production reflect the anti-social conditions historically necessary for its operation. But first we must turn to the historical events which created each of these necessary conditions, without which the emergence of the capitalist system would not have been possible in the first place--and which it must continue to produce and reproduce to maintain its existence: the primitive accumulation of its reserve army of labor: a critical mass of people, uprooted from the basic means of subsistence and forced to work for wages. 

It is important to locate capitalism as a stage (hopefully the last) in the development of Western Civilization’s hierarchic patriarchal orders. We’ll take a brief Google Earth-like look (from a hundred miles up!) at the stages of this development, beginning in the Roman period, then on to medieval Europe, and finally, focusing on England, where a critical mass of potential wage laborers was first employed in the factories of merchant capitalists and in those of nascent industrialists, which led to the industrial revolution and hegemonic capitalism’s wage system in the early 19th century. The initial process of primitive accumulation took centuries. Today the primitive accumulation of capitalism’s global work force is produced and reproduced at breakneck speed by “modernizing” NGO’s, bankers, and bombers.

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 Western Civilization, originated in the upper Nile Valley, travelled north by conquest and trade to Egypt, then east to Mesopotamia, then along the coastal regions of the Anatolian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, on to Mycenaean Crete and other islands of the Aegean Sea, then along the coasts of the Adriatic and Black Seas. The Old (Upper Nile) Kingdoms of ancient Egypt were transitional from matrilineal social organization to the pharaonic patriarchies of the Second and Third Kingdoms. This Google Earth tour will not focus on the cultural richness and technical achievements of the ancient Mediterranean civilizations, but on the social conditions of its working populations. From this point of view, Rome--which eventually conquered and appropriated the cultures of the entire Mediterranean region--in its glorification of military prowess, its contempt for women and the laboring classes as such--epitomized Western Civilization’s patriarchal hierarchies. 

Having originated from a band of social outcasts who incorporated themselves by abducting (and raping ) women from neighboring tribes, “Rome” quickly expanded into a colonizing military state that spread throughout Italy. Under semi-mythical law-givers like (the patronizing misogynist) Numa, federated tribal councils soon evolved into the Roman senate: an exclusively male club of slave-owning, patrician proprietors of self-sufficient estates. Republican Rome was a complex hierarchy of free citizens: merchants, soldier/slave holding colonists, and the “bread and  circus” plebes of the cities ( freemen who could prove descent from an ancient Roman tribe and who could claim protection and subsidies from an upper class “client”). Roman women were virtually the property of their typically promiscuous husbands, and were praised for their (Roman) purity and submissiveness. 

Slavery was the main form of labor in both republican and imperial Rome. Slaves ranged from highly educated and skilled Greeks to German and Slavic “barbarians.” Slaves were exploited as domestic servants, agrarian workers of the latifundia, brutally driven laborers in state and private mines, oarsmen on merchant ships, skilled artisans in workshops, clerks in stores owned by free businessmen, pedagogues, and scribes. The manufacturing and commercial center of the Empire was in the conquered, Greek, Byzantine, East. Roman senators and other patricians in the Western Empire prided themselves on living self-sufficiently on their estates, where slave-produced surpluses often were sold to traders for money, which was lent out at interest. Slavery in the Roman Empire was not of the ancient, familial type, but very similar to the cold, destructively venal plantation slavery of the Americas--and to the modern wage-slavery exploited in the industrialized fields, factories, and sweat shops of contemporary, global finance capitalism.

 The Roman Empire has been the most admired of the ancient world’s civilizations among the educated bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, the vaunted “Roman peace” was really a “peace” of constant wars of conquest--or against rebelling tribes, provinces, or slaves. (In the words of Tacitus, “...they made a wasteland and called it peace.”) The empire became expensive to maintain, corrupting and enervating those enriched by it. Taxes accumulated. Foreign mercenaries replaced citizen soldiers. By the 3rd century a.d., romanized tribal groups were pressuring the imperial borders which they were bribed and organized to defend.These bands of soldiers and their families, led by “kings,” were in turn being pressured by other, larger, less “civilized” tribal groups to the north and east who were moving southward and westward, toward Rome. In the turmoil, slaves and serfs and indebted farmers often fled their masters and creditors, and turned to barbarian “kings” and “governors” for protection. 

The Roman system didn’t fall, it dissolved. By 476 a.d. (the date usually accepted for the collapse of the Empire in the West), most of the Western half of the Roman Empire was governed by either Ostrogoths (Italy), Visigoths (Spain), Vandals (Africa), Lombards (northern Italy) or Franks (Gaul, southern Germany). While the Western Empire was dissolving and re-forming, Constantinople was founded (330 a.d.) on the site of the ancient city of Byzantium by Constantine as de facto capital of “Rome,” and Christianity was made the official religion (380 a.d.) of the Roman world. 

The fall of the Roman empire did not include the Byzantine East, which held on until 1453, when the Ottomans renamed Constantinople Istanbul. In the West, the bishop of Rome (the pope) remained in Rome (when he could), wielding what remained of Roman imperial power: the cross--at once the means by which Rome terrified and executed its slaves and rebels, and symbol of the temporal and spiritual power of the Roman Church in the evolving feudal order. We’ll take up feudalism in the next post.