Lecture
Developed feudalism is characterized by the completion of the formation of all the basic features of the feudal order — the system of relations between serfs and their lord, the system of vassalage, and hereditary feudal landholding. The serf peasantry forms the bulk of the productive population. By this time, out of the former multitude of forms of personal and land dependence, one or two predominant forms of serf dependence take shape. The peasant household is predominantly natural (subsistence) in character, and the feudal dues are likewise natural in form: either in the form of labor service (corvée rent) or in the form of dues in kind (produce rent, more widespread in the territory of the Romanized states — Italy, Spain, and southern France).
Feudal rent is the basic form of appropriation of the surplus product in feudal society through the performance of duties by serfs in favor of their lord (in various forms — labor rent or corvée, rent in produce or dues in kind, money rent). Labor rent (corvée) is a form of feudal rent in which the serf performed duties in favor of the lord by working on the lord's own demesne farm. Produce rent (dues in kind) is a form of feudal rent in which the serf performed duties in favor of the lord by handing over to him part of the produce grown on his own allotment.
Money rent is a form of feudal rent in which the serf performed duties in favor of the lord by paying him part of his monetary income obtained from production for the market (from his own allotment or from outside trades). The conversion of feudal dues into monetary form is called commutation. The development of feudal relations promoted the advance of the productive forces, since it ensured economic stabilization of the peasant household by turning the peasant family's land allotment into a conditional grant from the lord (thereby protecting it from loss of land), and at the same time ensured effective mobilization of the surplus product. The serf peasant (to say nothing of the free peasant) had a more economically guaranteed existence than a slave or a communal peasant under Asiatic despotism, or in classical and late Antiquity. Even the free community member under pre-feudal modes of production lived under the constant threat of falling into bonded dependence and losing his allotment. The serf was not exposed to such a danger. The rate of exploitation of the serf was fairly stable.
This relative economic independence of the peasant also served as a precondition for the growth of the productive forces. During the feudal period there occurred the spread of the three-field system, the expansion of cultivated land through so-called internal colonization, the development of horticulture and market gardening, and the improvement of soil cultivation through the wider spread of ploughs with iron shares. However, one should not overestimate the progress of the productive forces in the era of early and developed (classical) feudalism. The level of agricultural technique in this period still lagged behind that achieved during the heyday of the Roman Empire. Grain yields in medieval Italy did not exceed the yields achieved on that same territory in Roman antiquity. A number of Roman achievements in horticulture, market gardening, crafts, and construction were practically lost and were then restored only over a very long historical period. The problem of the regression of the productive forces in the feudal era:
The situation described above gives grounds to question the basic tenets of the materialist conception of history — the conditioning of relations of production by the level and character of development of the productive forces, and the lawful succession of modes of production under the impact of the productive forces' transition to a qualitatively higher stage. However, this problem appears insoluble only within the framework of a mechanistic interpretation of the materialist conception of history, one that slides into oversimplification in understanding the basic postulates of classical Marxism (which is why Stalinist "Marxism-Leninism" preferred simply to ignore the existence of this problem altogether).
Attention should be drawn to the fact that these regularities, like any regularities of social development in general, are realized only in the final analysis and do not operate with mechanical automatism. And in the final analysis, feudal society surpassed both the ancient and the Asiatic in the productivity of agriculture, in the technical progress of food processing and storage, in the development of crafts and construction, and in the level of cultural achievement in such fields as medicine, education, and so on. Moreover, one should not forget that, from the Marxist point of view, the most important component of the productive forces is man himself. From this point of view, feudal society gives us a new figure as the principal producer of material goods — the relatively economically independent (though dependent) peasant. This peasant, while not personally entirely free and full of rights, is nevertheless freer than the peasant under Asiatic despotism, and although he falls short of the free peasant of Antiquity in legal standing, he is more free in economic terms, for he has a firm guarantee of his allotment and is less bound by communal regulation. These qualities of his reveal their potentially progressive character most fully toward the end of the period of classical feudalism, together with the onset of the process of emancipating the peasants from personal dependence. Another such figure is the free town dweller. Guild regulation of urban occupations and estate inequality do not make him fully free, but he is freer than the inhabitant of an ancient or Asiatic city, since, despite estate inequality, he possesses not only personal rights and freedoms but also belongs to a corporation of townsmen that defends the rights of its members (the guilds and corporations of the free towns of the Middle Ages).
These two figures interact with one another in the classical Middle Ages: the peasant finds in the townsman a growing market for the development of his commodity farming, while the townsman finds in the peasant a supplier of raw materials and food for the expansion of his craft production. Finally, one must reckon with the fact that eras of social revolution and the upheavals associated with them often lead to a temporary regression and even decline of the productive forces, which may be historically long-lasting in character (depending on the degree of rupture in cultural continuity with the preceding society). Thus, the economic system of classical feudalism rested on two basic classes of society — the feudal lords and the serf peasants. The ruling class (the feudal lords) was structured by means of a hierarchy of vassal relations, at the top of which stood the monarch (the king). Vassal-suzerain relations were not necessarily sealed by dependence on land (a vassal did not necessarily receive his lands as a grant from his immediate suzerain), but mutual obligations connected with military, political, and administrative functions were in force. The monarch, as supreme suzerain, gradually lost the despotic power of the early feudal king as hereditary feudal landholding grew and seigneurial immunity developed. The king became merely "first among equals."
His greatest vassals, concentrating in their hands vast lands often exceeding the royal domain (for example, the Dukes of Burgundy in France), began to play an independent role in the state, at times laying claim to the status of independent monarchs. A period of feudal fragmentation set in, often leading to the breakup and redrawing of the borders of the original feudal states. The fact that the king's vassals had their own vassals, over whom the former acted as suzerains, turned their lands, together with the lands of their own vassals, into virtually independent states. In some countries this was reinforced by the establishment of the principle "the vassal of my vassal is not my vassal," which largely removed the lesser vassals, grouped around the greatest representatives of the feudal elite, from the king's direct authority. It was during this period that institutions of estate representation arose in a number of European states (Parliament in England and Scotland, the Estates-General in France, the Cortes in Spain), which in practice served as a political form for limiting royal power through the power of noble factions, and it was then that the personal rights of the nobility received legal fixation (a classic example being the Magna Carta, signed by the English King John Lackland in 1215). Feudal exploitation in that period took the form mainly of rent in kind or labor rent (in Russia, dues and corvée), the amount of which was regulated by tradition. On the one hand, this amount could not be set arbitrarily by the lord (both by virtue of tradition and because of the existence of objective limits on the extraction of surplus product); on the other hand, there existed no formal legal obstacles to such arbitrariness. Only in a later period, under the influence of peasant uprisings, with the disintegration of serfdom and the growth of the economic strength of peasant households, did the codification of feudal dues occur in some places. Feudal rent was extracted in various forms, often taking the guise of payments intended for the "redemption" by the peasants of a number of traditional feudal rights — the "right of the dead hand" (i.e., the lord's right to the property of a deceased serf, so that for the property to pass to the heirs they had to pay a redemption fee), and the "right of the first night" (the corresponding redemption payment and the fee for the right to marry were known in France as "formariage," which literally means "for marriage").
Of course, these rights were far from always exercised in reality, and fairly quickly acquired the character of a mere pretext for levying feudal dues. Often the dues appeared under the guise of traditional communal mutual aid (felling timber, clearing arable land, building roads and bridges, and so on). Alongside these there also existed dues arbitrarily imposed by the lord (the taille in France, later, from 1439, turned into a state tax; "boon-work" duties fixed by the assizes of the English King Henry II in the twelfth century). Over time, feudal dues were often consolidated into a limited number of forms. Work on the lord's own farm or payment of rent in produce was combined with a considerable degree of control by the lord over the economic activity of the rural community. For him, the community served above all as an instrument for the compulsory collection of feudal dues (through collective liability). Of course, the economic activity of the communal peasants rested mainly on tradition: on the system of compulsory crop rotation under the three-field system (the alternation of spring sowing, winter sowing, and fallow), and on the "open field" system — free grazing of livestock after the harvest and on land left fallow. In addition, the community was used by the peasants as an instrument for fixing traditional dues (through the establishment by village assemblies of so-called communal charters).
The classical medieval period also saw the appearance of elements of legal protection for the status of the land allotments of serf peasants in Western Europe. Towns One of the most characteristic and at the same time quite specific features of West European feudalism is the phenomenon of free towns. European towns in the Middle Ages developed not only as administrative centers (capitals of states and administrative subdivisions) but also as points of concentration of craft and trade, arising for economic reasons and not merely as a result of the concentration of demand from nobility residing in capitals (as was the case in the East), or the settling of population serving fortresses and similar fortified points. After a period of considerable decline of the ancient cities (with a certain exception for Byzantium), the process of urban growth developed in the tenth to twelfth centuries together with the gradual separation of craft from agriculture. Towns formed out of settlements at crossroads of trade routes, at ports, in centers of fishing, mineral extraction, and at sites of regular fairs, and so on. Such towns had rather few nobles among their population (initially these were for the most part rank-and-file retainers), and consisted mainly of craftsmen and merchants. Many towns were small, serving only the surrounding rural areas. But at this time large towns also formed (often on the basis of surviving cities of Antiquity, especially in southern Europe — Italy, Spain, southern France), oriented toward the production of craft goods and trade for the needs of extensive territories, including export. The cause of the growth of European medieval towns was undoubtedly both the economic progress achieved in the agrarian sphere and the peculiarities of the socioeconomic position of the European medieval peasantry. Production in the peasant household grew, and its relatively separate (private) character was realized in the possibility for the more prosperous part of the peasantry to sell surplus agricultural produce on the market.
At first this trade was episodic and seasonal in character (from fair to fair; the very word "fair" — Jahrmarkt in the original German — literally means "annual market") and served mainly the exchange of specialized products of the peasant household and surpluses of peasant craft production. But this exchange gradually created a market for the emergence of specialized crafts as well — both in the sense of the growing monetary demand of peasants and nobility for higher-quality craft goods, and in the sense of expanding supplies of raw materials for craft production (wood, hides, sheep's and goat's wool, flax, products of mining trades, and so on). The subsequent process of concentration of such specialized craft and trade in towns in turn led to an expansion both of demand for the produce of peasant households and of the supply of craft goods, and fostered the further drawing of the peasantry into commodity production. Initially, towns founded on land belonging to some secular or ecclesiastical lord had a status similar to that of rural communities. Townsmen bore duties in favor of their lord (and among these duties, monetary rather than payments in kind occupied a significant share from the very beginning). However, there were also substantial differences, connected not only with the predominant occupation of the population but also with the fact that a significant part of the townspeople (many craftsmen, shopkeepers, merchants, money-changers and moneylenders, hired servants, hired soldiers) were, already at an early stage of urban development, regarded — in contrast to the peasants — as personally free people (insofar as this was at all possible in feudal society). A poor urban day laborer, unlike a prosperous villein or serf, could be a personally free man. Fairly soon after the formation of towns of any significant size, their struggle to acquire various liberties, and even for complete liberation from feudal dependence, began.
It took various forms — from the redemption of liberties to armed uprisings. This struggle was facilitated by peculiarities of the socioeconomic position of the urban population: the concentration of population, the presence of a significant stratum of personally free townsmen, the beginnings of urban self-government, the presence of urban fortifications and a military organization, and the presence of estate and corporate associations defending the rights of their members. The more these features of urban life were fixed in law and received legal sanction, the more the townsmen could rely on them in their further struggle for the expansion of liberties. Some towns turned into independent city-states with adjoining dependent territory (the city-states of northern Italy), others acquired the status of imperial or royal free towns (Germany, France, the Netherlands). Still, far from all towns managed to free themselves from feudal dependence. Nevertheless, most West European towns acquired the following privileges:
At the very bottom were beggars, day laborers, and newcomers (often fugitive serfs) who had not yet acquired the status of townsmen, and craftsmen's apprentices, who together formed the layer of the urban plebs. Next came masters and journeymen, shopkeepers, merchants, money-changers, and moneylenders. And at the very top stood the urban patriciate. It included the elite of the wealthiest masters, merchants, and moneylenders, as well as the noble aristocracy residing in the towns. All these social and occupational groups (with the exception of the nobility) were united in various corporations — guilds, formed along occupational lines, merchant guilds, and the like. Some townsmen belonged to the urban militia (which likewise relied on the guild organization). In large towns even beggars and thieves sometimes had their own guild-like organizations. The guild organization of the urban economy reflected the underdeveloped character of commodity production and the market in medieval towns, and the orientation of production primarily toward limited local markets. The main task of the guilds was by no means to ensure the expansion of entrepreneurial activity, but rather to regulate it with the aim of stabilizing production and the market, and of ensuring the reproduction of the urban economy on an unchanging scale. The guilds regulated the volume of production and prices, the quality of goods (understood as their conformity to established patterns, which hindered technical progress), the number of apprentices and journeymen a master could have, the terms of apprenticeship and the rules for moving from one rank to another (from apprentice to journeyman, from journeyman to master), and rates of pay. Craftsmen and traders who did not belong to guilds, and merchants who were not members of merchant guilds, were as a rule either barred from the town markets or subjected to high duties. Medieval towns used their corporate unions to organize the struggle for liberation from feudal dependence.
Intra-urban class contradictions in the early period of the history of West European medieval towns were not open in character and rarely took acute forms (riots and disturbances of the urban plebs). Far more conspicuous was the rivalry among urban patrician families for dominance. This rivalry took especially vivid forms in the Italian city-states (echoes of such rivalry can be seen in the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets in Verona, immortalized by Shakespeare). The majestic walls and towers of patrician town houses, adorned with battlements, still preserve the memory of the real intra-urban wars of that time. The urban culture of the Middle Ages gave rise to such an important cultural phenomenon as universities. They arose at the end of the twelfth and in the thirteenth century in southern and western Europe, spread to Central Europe from the fourteenth century, and to northern Europe from the fifteenth century. The university was a variety of medieval urban corporation with internal self-government. The original Latin name of universities translates as "corporation (universitas) of masters and students." Universities formed as a system of higher education independent of the Church (primarily medical and legal education), although every university necessarily also had a theological faculty.
Alongside the universities, a secular school organizationally independent of the Church also took shape. Universities represented a kind of international corporation, a fact facilitated by teaching in Latin, common to educated Europe, as well as by the mutual recognition of degrees conferred by universities. Universities very quickly became centers of free thought and the spread of urban religious heresies. The Catholic Church and royal power competed for influence over the universities (in the end, many universities came under the control of Catholic orders), including through granting them various privileges. The Church saw in them an important point of ideological struggle, while royal power saw in them a system for training a qualified state apparatus and ruling elite. Universities were one of the few channels of vertical social mobility in the Middle Ages. Although a significant part of the student body belonged to the nobility, personally free representatives of other estates could also enter universities. Those who graduated from a university could aspire to significant church offices, as well as to entry into the influential corporations of lawyers or physicians. In a number of towns, the privileges of students were close to those of the nobility (for example, the right to carry a sword). The development and growth of towns led to a substantial growth of the domestic market.
The urban population created demand for food and raw materials for crafts, in turn increasing the supply of craft products. Small traders and merchants, buying up craft and agricultural produce, including for foreign trade, promoted the intensification and specialization of craft production and the growth of its scale, and also drew the produce of peasant households and seigneurial demesnes into commodity circulation. This process had a twofold effect on the relations of production in the agrarian sector. On the one hand, a specialized (mainly suburban) peasant economy developed, increasingly oriented toward marketing its produce and, in turn, itself falling into dependence on the market (a peasant specializing in wool production was forced to buy food). The development of merchant trade through the buying-up of peasant household produce also drew into commodity production those peasant households that were located far from towns. As for the demesne (the estate farm of the lord), the growth of commodity relations had an ambiguous effect on it. Some demesnes shifted from labor rent to produce rent (from corvée to dues in kind), and the demesne independently entered the market with large batches of peasant produce collected in this way. Others went straight over to the commutation of feudal dues, that is, they replaced the former dues with money rent (which the peasants, having shifted to commodity farming, could now pay). On the other hand, the growth of the commodity economy resulted in what is known as the seigneurial reaction.
Many lords, pursuing the benefits of selling agricultural produce on the market, sought to significantly increase the production of goods in demand on their own manorial farm (demesne), and to this end increased the volume of labor rent, that is, the length of time peasants had to work on the lord's estate. All these tendencies together caused an intensification of the class struggle in the West European countryside during the classical Middle Ages. Whereas in the early Middle Ages peasant unrest was mainly local in character and directed against the processes of the formation of personal dependence of peasants and violations of tradition in the establishment of peasant dues, the classical Middle Ages saw major peasant uprisings. These uprisings reflected the growing economic independence of the peasantry,
their desire to consolidate this independence by limiting feudal exploitation (by lowering the rate of extraction of feudal
rent), and at the same time a protest against
the seigneurial reaction. Hence there arose both more
moderate demands for fixing feudal dues at a lower level,
demands for liberation from personal dependence, and more radical demands — for example, the demand for equality
of estates. Such features are quite clearly visible in the well-known revolt of Wat
Tyler in England in 1381.
The development of the commodity economy in the towns, already in the classical Middle Ages, led, in the regions of Europe most developed in this
respect, to the growth of
the preconditions for capitalist relations of production. In the Italian towns (Venice, Genoa, Milan), already in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
banking developed,
trade developed, and Venice and Genoa
took shape as trading republics
oriented toward foreign trade.
The growth of trade and crafts was accompanied by the disintegration of feudal relations.
At the end of the thirteenth century, Florence and Bologna declared the emancipation of peasants from serfdom on the lands under their control. This emancipation was not accompanied by any securing of the peasant's rights to his
land plot, which turned him in the
countryside into a tenant, or forced him, in search of a livelihood, to move to the towns, into the
position of the most rightless part of the urban plebs.
The disintegration of serfdom undermined the influence of the landed feudal lords. Political hegemony in the Italian city-
states passed from the feudal lords (the grandi) to the prosperous townsmen (the popolani).
The further development of commodity production led to the emergence of the first
forms of capitalism. Thus, in northern Italy
(in Florence, Siena, Perugia, and other towns), by the middle of the fourteenth century there was growth
in cloth-making manufactories based
on wage labor. The word "capital" came into
common usage in Italy. The weakness
of these early forms of capitalism was expressed
in the fact that the founding of a manufactory was
still beyond the means of an individual capitalist. The manufactories were in the collective ownership of mixed trading, industrial, and banking companies.
A manufactory is
a large enterprise based on the use of hand tools and on the division of
labor (by product or by operation)
in the making of finished goods. It is characteristic of the period from the fourteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. From the point of view of relations of production,
manufactories could employ either serf labor or wage labor.
A manufactory may be centralized or dispersed, when scattered
small producers are subordinated to a manufactory-style division of labor by virtue of their dependence on a middleman (who supplies raw materials and
buys up finished goods), acting as
a merchant-entrepreneur.
In Florence in the fourteenth century there were about
30,000 ciompi (from the Italian ciompi) —
wage laborers who worked in cloth-making workshops and manufactories, making up
about a quarter of the city's population.
The level of labor exploitation was appalling:
the working day lasted 14-16 hours, and the workers
were subjected to numerous fines,
corporal punishment, and imprisonment in the
prisons set up at the manufactories.
The owner of a manufactory could dismiss a worker without any warning. The system of fines reduced real earnings below subsistence level. The ciompi were not members of guilds and, accordingly, were deprived, in the
city, of all political rights.
In 1345, the Florentine wool
carder Ciuto Brandini created the first organization of wage laborers. His arrest and
execution provided the occasion for the first major strike, which
took place that same year.
In 1371, significant disturbances of wage laborers broke out in Perugia and Siena.
In 1378, the ciompi rose in revolt in
Florence and held state power in the
city for more than a month. These were the first class battles of the nascent pre-proletariat. In the more backward regions of Italy in the fourteenth century, where the influence of developed urban industry was not so pronounced, the development of the commodity economy was accompanied by an intensification of feudal exploitation (the seigneurial reaction). As a result, a number of peasant uprisings occurred in Italy (the revolt of Dolcino and others). It was precisely the urban culture that had taken shape in the classical Middle Ages that became the soil on which, at the turn from classical to late feudalism, there grew a powerful cultural movement that came to be known as the Renaissance (from the French Renaissance).
This movement arose in Italy (in the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries) and then spread, at the end of the fifteenth and in the sixteenth centuries, to the countries of southern, western, and central Europe. The Renaissance marked the transition of feudalism to its late stage, and the emergence and development within its framework of new bourgeois relations, which predetermined significant shifts in medieval culture and worldview. Feudal society of the classical Middle Ages had multiple economic sectors and a complex social structure. Like ancient and Asiatic society, it had a class character, though the classes of feudal society appeared on the surface of social relations, including in their legal forms, as estates (the specific features of the estate division of society were already examined in the previous chapter). The main economic sectors of feudal society were as follows: The serf economy. It consisted of the household economies of personally dependent serf peasants, who were holders of land allotments received from their lord and were obliged to pay him rent (in labor, in kind, or in money); as well as of the economy conducted on the lord's own demesne by the labor of the same serfs (the seigneurial economy). The serf economy was predominantly natural (subsistence) in character, but over time both the peasants' household economy and the seigneurial economy began to be drawn into commodity circulation. The economy of free peasants.
Free peasants were owners of their allotments (formally they could also be regarded as holders of royal land, though they were not serfs of the king), and bore duties only in the form of royal taxes and church tithes, as well as, under certain conditions, in the form of military service. Their economy, not bound by serf regulation, was drawn into commodity circulation more quickly than that of the serfs. The urban craft-and-trade sector. Free townsmen — craftsmen and traders — conducted independent commodity production. It was regulated by guild and corporate charters and by decisions of the town magistrates. In such an economy, wage labor could be employed on a small scale, and it became more widespread with the development of manufactories. Not only in the early period but, in some countries, also under classical feudalism, fairly noticeable vestiges of the slaveholding sector were characteristic. Such a multiplicity of economic sectors was expressed in an even more variegated social structure.
In feudal society three main estates could be distinguished, much as was legally fixed in late feudal France: the first — the clergy, the second — the nobility, the third — the commoners. However, within each of these estates there were social groups differing in status. In the first estate: priests; church servants without holy orders; monks.
In the second: the monarch and his kinsmen; the top of the nobility — the nobility of high rank; the untitled, petty, and landless nobility. Later a division arose between personal and hereditary nobles. The third estate was characterized by a sharp distinction between free and personally dependent commoners. Personally free people in the towns: the prosperous elite of townsmen — rich merchants and masters, members of guilds and corporations;
ordinary townsmen — small shopkeepers not belonging to guilds, and journeymen; the lowest layer of townsmen — apprentices, day laborers, and déclassé elements. Personally free people in the countryside: personally free peasants who were not in landed dependence on any lord; personally free holders of manorial allotments; landless personally free peasants — farm laborers. The status of the personally dependent also varied. There were different forms of serf dependence, differing both in the grounds of their origin and in the extent of the serfs' obligations to their lord, the limits placed on their rights, and the possibilities of obtaining free status. For example, in Rus: kholops, ryadovichi, zakupy, bobyli, and so on. Over time the status of various groups of serfs converged, and they often merged into a single group, but this process was far from being fully completed everywhere.
Late feudalism is characterized by the consolidation of a tendency, which had already arisen in the classical Middle Ages, toward shifting the center of production of the surplus product from the demesne to the peasant household. This tendency meant the gradual disintegration of the real economic functions of the ruling class and the growth of the economic significance of the independent peasant household. Together with the growth of production in peasant households, the concentration of crafts in towns, and the resulting deepening of the social division of labor, there occurs a growth of commodity production and an expansion of commodity circulation. In Europe, under the influence of the needs of the commodity economy, significant technological progress took place. Such inventions as gunpowder and printing, the compass, and mechanical clocks found wide application. Notable progress occurred in shipbuilding and in the construction of a network of canals, and the use of water and wind mills expanded (including in industry), as did that of water pumps for draining water from mines, and so on. In agriculture, with the disintegration of serfdom and the decline of communal relations, the transition began from the three-field system to crop-rotation and ley-farming systems. The increase in the volume of trade and commodity-money exchange increased the role of money and created the basis for the growing importance of money rent. The growth of the economic independence of the peasant household became the basis for the peasants' struggle for liberation from serf dependence.
Under conditions of the growing importance of commodity-money relations and money rent, part of the feudal lords found themselves objectively interested in the personal emancipation of the peasants (while retaining feudal dues based on land dependence). A personally free peasant has more opportunities to organize effective production for the market (both in agriculture and in crafts), and thus the size of the money rent he pays can also grow. Competition begins to develop between peasant craft trades and guild crafts in the towns, the latter bound by numerous regulations. As a result, in countries and regions with developed commodity production (England, northern Italy, southern France, Holland), the gradual liberation of peasants from personal dependence begins in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this process spreads to a number of other West European countries as well. However, this does not eliminate the system of feudal exploitation, since the personally free peasant remains a conditional holder of a land allotment from his lord (for example, the English copyholders, as distinct from the far less numerous freeholders — free holders). In a number of northern European countries (Norway, Iceland, partly Denmark, Sweden, and Finland) and in Switzerland, the estate of free peasants remained quite numerous (and in some places even predominant) during this period. In these countries, the gradual growth of commodity production and capitalist relations did not require a mass struggle against serf dependence. Estate inequality in these countries did not acquire such pronounced features as in other European countries. The expansion of the scale of commodity production and trade meant a significant expansion of the domestic market. Agricultural and craft production oriented toward the market went beyond the bounds of suburban farms and urban guild crafts. The bounds of guild regulation began to constrain the development of commodity production and private enterprise. In the towns there was a growth of manufactory production, developing essentially outside guild regulation. Craft production outside the towns also received notable development, growing out of peasant trades (so-called domestic industry). The prosperous peasantry began to produce from within its own ranks a trading-and-craft elite.
Thus, the development of commodity production led to the transformation of the prosperous stratum of peasants and craftsmen, who had the opportunity to conduct intensive specialized production for the market (or to engage in trade), into a petty bourgeoisie. The petty bourgeoisie consists of commodity producers who run their households mainly on the basis of their own labor.
Alongside the petty bourgeoisie, a middle and large bourgeoisie also forms from among the merchants and moneylenders, who no longer merely parasitize on the feudal order but actively serve commodity producers through credit operations and trade mediation, often subjecting small commodity producers to their control and leading to their proletarianization.
As a result, yet another group of the middle and large bourgeoisie arises — the manufactory owners. In this process of the genesis of the bourgeoisie, that part of the representatives of feudal landholding also takes part which is drawn into production for the market and into private enterprise, restructuring its seigneurial economy (demesne) on the basis of capitalist relations — for example, by leasing land to prosperous peasants conducting intensive commodity farming. Within the old urban guilds, contradictions grow between the masters, on the one hand, and the apprentices and journeymen, on the other. Under conditions of growing competition, the masters try to defend their privileged position by restricting membership in the guilds, extending the term of apprenticeship, and tightening the conditions for the advancement of journeymen to master status. This increases the closed character of guild craft and gives the guild organization a reactionary character that hinders the growth of the productive forces. International trade develops significantly, both within Europe and beyond its borders.
Under conditions of Turkish expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans, the traditional trade routes to the East were cut off, which, on the one hand, led to the decline of the trading-and-craft city republics of Italy, which were largely oriented toward Levantine trade, and to the development of a feudal reaction in Italy, and, on the other hand, led to persistent searches for new trade routes. These searches gave rise to the Age of Great Geographic Discoveries (the second European discovery of America, the discovery of the sea route to India and Southeast Asia around the African continent). Hand in hand with the development of world trade went colonial conquests. The genocide of the local population in the Spanish colonies of Central and South America caused a shortage of labor and gave rise to the active participation of the leading European colonial powers (Spain, England, Portugal) in the slave trade. The slaveholding sector in the colonies became one of the foundations of the primitive accumulation of capital and the development of private enterprise in the metropolitan countries. Colonial expansion and the development of world trade meant a rapid growth of the market and an expansion of opportunities for commodity production and private enterprise in Europe. A significant part of the national economy of many European countries was drawn into commodity relations. The era began of the formation of unified national markets and of so-called primitive accumulation of capital. Primitive accumulation of capital is a historical phenomenon that by no means corresponds to the popular notion of a gradual, thrifty accumulation of wealth destined to be used as capital.
If, in the spirit of the Marxist approach, we understand capital not as a thing but as a social relation, then the development of such a relation requires at least two figures. The first is the owner of money who intends to use his wealth in the sphere of commodity production and circulation — that is, not for wasteful consumption, and not for acquiring new lands or serfs, but for increasing value. The second is the free worker. Free in a twofold sense: free from the bonds of feudal or guild regulation, and free from the means of production. This leaves him no other option than to hire himself out to the owner of capital, that is, to sell his labor power — the only possession he still has. The primitive accumulation of capital is the process of forming the historical preconditions for capitalist relations of production, expressed in the concentration of monetary wealth at one social pole, and the development of the separation of personally free petty commodity producers from the means of production and sources of subsistence at the other. This creates the possibility of transforming money into capital through the hiring and exploitation of free labor power.
While feudal lords, the upper crust of urban craft masters, merchants, and moneylenders faced no insurmountable obstacles to accumulating monetary wealth (though some obstacles did exist, and the struggle against them will be discussed later), the formation of a free labor force required a genuine revolution in production relations. The medieval peasant differed from the peasants of the Asiatic and ancient modes of production in that, within the "lord–serf" relationship, he was not threatened with loss of land
. His allotment was guaranteed by his status as a serf. The gradual abolition of relations of personal dependence in the classical and late Middle Ages did not eliminate dependence on land. The peasant remained the holder of an allotment belonging to a particular lord. To turn him into a free worker, he had to be deprived of this allotment. But why would a landlord want to deprive his serfs of their land allotments? After all, this very allotment was the lord's main source of feudal rent. Yes, that is true — but only so long as the lord himself was not drawn into commodity production and capitalist enterprise. Historically, the dispossession of peasants of their land could occur in various ways. In England, the profitability of producing wool for export to Dutch manufactories prompted the landlords engaged in this business (the "new nobility") to expand pastureland for sheep, and to that end to drive peasants off their allotments — a process known as "enclosure" ("sheep devoured men," as Thomas More put it).
This process gave rise to a mass of paupers and vagabonds, against whom the British state applied methods of bloody repression (the death penalty for vagrancy and for theft) in order to force them into becoming hired workers on terms dictated by employers. In Northern Italy, the entrenched urban nobility compelled local feudal lords to free the peasants from feudal obligations — but without granting them land allotments, which turned the peasants into farmhands or tenants and also swelled the ranks of the disenfranchised labor force in the cities. In a number of other countries, the emergence of free hired labor proceeded more gradually, driven mainly by the property differentiation among commodity producers — both rural and urban — that is inevitable under commodity production. The ruin of craftsmen was hastened by the abolition of guild regulation of crafts, which left apprentices and journeymen without any property rights or guarantees of employment. The ruin and dispossession of free peasants was hastened by a substantial increase in state taxes and by competition from large landed estates against small and less efficient peasant farms, which were, moreover, burdened by feudal obligations.
The breakup of large feudal estates, the growth in the number of land-poor and landless nobles, and the restrictions on feudal immunity imposed by the strengthening royal power also contributed to the growth of a free propertyless population, as feudal retinues were disbanded and the numbers of servants in feudal manors sharply declined. One way or another — whether through violent methods or largely without them — late feudalism was marked by the rapid formation of a stratum of personally free but propertyless people, who formed the basis for the class of hired workers. Of course, however numerous this stratum became, it still fell far short in numbers of the peasants, craftsmen, and servants, who remained the largest groups among the laboring classes. The large-scale development of commodity economy eventually led to the emergence of a phenomenon such as a unified national market, replacing a collection of loosely connected local markets. Alongside the formation of a unified national market — which meant a new level of economic and social ties among the population within the borders of state formations — a new level of human community was taking shape: nations and national languages. Thus states, too, acquired the character of national states. Nationalism (that is, the defense of the interests of the national state) became the ideology of the growing bourgeoisie (both petty and large), which was interested in strengthening the national market and in its protection by state power. The development of commodity production and the national market ran up, within the country, against obstacles in the form of feudal partitions: the national market was cut into pieces by feudal domains, at whose borders various duties and tolls had to be paid.
Feudal immunity hindered the uniform application of law across the whole territory of the country and deprived entrepreneurs of firm legal guarantees for their activity. Entrepreneurial activity was bound by numerous regulations and exclusive privileges granted to particular persons or companies with connections to the royal court. It was precisely this era of unfolding struggle for liberation from various feudal bonds and barriers — and, together with it, against the old religious morality that had shackled human creative powers — that gave rise to the phenomenon of the Renaissance. The Renaissance was, first and foremost, a process taking place in the sphere of culture, expressing the assertion of a new worldview imbued with humanism. Humanism, as an intellectual movement, upholds the sovereignty of the human personality,1 the priority of a person's individual capacities and abilities over class-based morality,
1 Contrary to a widespread belief, humanism can in no way be reduced to pity for the "humiliated and insulted." Its ideal, on the contrary, is the titan-man, the fighter-man. In this sense, F. M. Dostoevsky — who once remarked, "Man is too broad; I would narrow him," and who in his speech in honor of the Pushkin jubilee proclaimed outright, "Humble yourself, proud man!" — comes across as a clear anti-humanist.
which had once and for all prescribed for a person a fixed role and rules of conduct in accordance with his inherited social status. At the same time, the ideal of Renaissance humanism rests on individualism, and almost all humanists of that era regarded mass social movements of the lower classes with sharp disapproval, seeing in them only a destructive force that suppressed the conditions for the flourishing of free individuality. The Renaissance, which began in the 14th century in Italy — the country where the foundations of capitalist relations developed earlier than elsewhere — spread to other European countries in the following centuries. It was accompanied by unprecedented progress in the visual arts and literature (beginning with the formation of national literary languages to replace Latin), in science, in intellectual life, and in morals and everyday behavioral norms.
A significant role in the Renaissance was played by the broad assimilation of the spiritual heritage of antiquity, and later by the emerging interest in the cultural achievements of the East. In the intellectual sphere, the most vivid manifestation of the Renaissance was the Church Reformation. The Catholic Church was substantially pushed back by the ideology of Protestantism, which rose up against the Church's petty regulation of human life, against ecclesiastical acquisitiveness, and in favor of limiting the Church's property claims — seeking salvation of the soul not so much through an idea of submission accompanied by the meticulous observance of church rites and rituals, but through the attainment of a righteous life through virtues more characteristic of the bourgeois way of life.
In many cases the Reformation served as a pretext for the secularization of church property (above all, landed property) — that is, its transfer to secular (royal) authority. At the same time, the Renaissance is inseparably linked with the development of free thought and the progress of science, which stood as an antithesis to the religious explanation of the surrounding world. It was precisely in the Renaissance that Copernicus's heliocentric system appeared, which was taken up by Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei; Michael Servetus created for the first time a scientific account of the human circulatory system; Vesalius's research in pathological anatomy gave an enormous impetus to the understanding of human anatomy; and Thomas More and Tommaso Campanella published their social utopias. All these thinkers were subjected to merciless persecution by the Church (both Catholic and Protestant), and Giordano Bruno and Michael Servetus ended their lives at the stake of the Inquisition (the former Catholic, the latter Calvinist). The development of economic relations in the era of late feudalism led to the gradual decline of the feudal order.
Over time (if only because of the growth of the noble population), large feudal estates break up, and the numbers of land-poor (petty landholding) and landless nobles grow. These strata of the nobility often find themselves threatened with ruin, and either become déclassé or are forced to seek new sources of income in private enterprise or state service (D'Artagnan, as depicted in Alexandre Dumas's "The Three Musketeers," is a vivid example of the latter case).
Nobles swell the ranks of and lead bands of adventurers of less "noble" origin who rushed to seize new lands and riches, in the process accomplishing much of what would later be called the great geographic discoveries. These same nobles, upon entering state service, form a loyal support base for royal power. Royal power, relying on the petty landholding and landless nobility, on the trading and money-lending bourgeoisie, and on manufacturers, gradually strengthens its position in the struggle against the weakening greatest feudal lords. The period of feudal fragmentation gives way to the formation of centralized state power together with the formation of national states (replacing the earlier patchwork of feudal domains bound by complex relations of suzerainty-vassalage and dynastic ties). This process finds its most complete expression in the era of absolutism.
Absolutism (absolute monarchy) — ____________ a form of the feudal state in the period of late feudalism. It is characterized by complete political centralization — the concentration of legislative and executive power in the hands of the monarch, who relies on a subordinate, ramified bureaucratic apparatus. A unified state judicial, police, and fiscal system arises. The army, formerly assembled from a combination of feudal retinues and the popular militia, is replaced by a standing royal army
Absolutism was characterized by a change in the form of rule of the dominant estate — the nobility. While remaining the dominant class, the feudal landowners lost many state (political, judicial, military, etc.) functions, which passed to the centralized bureaucratic apparatus of royal power. A relative independence of the state apparatus from the dominant class arises (which is a characteristic feature of bureaucracy). Absolutism is characterized by the appearance in the state of a new political force — the bourgeoisie, which is not yet able to displace the nobility from the helm of state power, but is already able to put forward and defend its own interests, taking advantage of the fact that royal power is interested both in growing revenues from trade and industrial activity,
and in having a certain counterweight to the separatism of the great feudal nobility. The relative independence of royal power was also expressed in the era of absolutism through the diminished role of, or outright abandonment of, systems of estate representation that had emerged in the preceding era. The seigniorial economy (the demesne), in competition with the market-oriented economy of peasants freed from personal dependence, gradually loses ground — unless it is itself converted to a private-enterprise basis, or unless the great feudal lord turns into a landlord who leases land to capitalist farmers rising from the ranks of prosperous peasants, or to merchants and moneylenders investing capital in agriculture. The efficiency of extracting feudal rent falls, and a significant part of the nobility is forced to live not so much on income from its estate as on service income and royal pensions. Correspondingly, there is a shift in the forms of exploiting the peasantry — the share of seigniorial rent falls, and the importance of state (royal) taxes grows as a source for paying salaries and pensions to the noble estate. This further strengthens the monarch's position in the struggle against the greatest feudal aristocracy. Step by step, it is stripped of feudal immunity. Judicial and military functions are taken away from the feudal lords and concentrated in the hands of royal officials. In this struggle, royal power finds support from the bourgeoisie, which is interested in the uniform application of laws throughout the state's territory and in the removal of feudal barriers to the development of the national market. In turn, royal power adopts a series of measures to encourage entrepreneurship (the policy of mercantilism). Mercantilism is the economic policy of European states in the early period of the development of capitalism. It was oriented primarily toward the accumulation of money (precious metals) in the hands of the royal treasury. To this end, a policy was pursued of maintaining an active trade balance, trade protectionism (higher duties on imports), encouraging manufacturing industry, founding monopoly foreign-trade companies, and trade and colonial expansion. This policy led to clashes among the European powers in the struggle for trade and industrial predominance.
Of course, the measures by which royal power encouraged trade and industry (which found their most consistent expression in the policy of Colbert, finance minister to King Louis XIV of France) were calculated not so much to placate its ally in the struggle against feudal separatism, as to expand the base of tax revenue flowing into the royal treasury. This policy did not in every respect serve the interests of the bourgeois class (petty regulation of production, the system of royal privileges, the creation of monopoly trading and industrial companies). Over time, the narrowness of mercantilist policy ceased to satisfy the bourgeoisie, but during the formative period of absolutism this policy played an objectively progressive role, contributing to the development of capitalism. The development of commodity economy led to the rapid growth of capitalist relations of production — but not throughout all of Europe.
In those regions of Europe where commodity production had not yet taken deep root, the expansion of markets for agricultural produce gave rise to phenomena of feudal reaction (already mentioned in the previous section with respect to England and Northern Italy). Feudal lords sought to exploit opportunities for selling marketable agricultural produce for personal enrichment by expanding production on the demesne (the lord's own estate). To this end, they tightened the forms of serf exploitation — increasing dues in kind or expanding corvée labor (up to 5–6 days a week). In the political sphere, feudal reaction was marked by a deepening of estate inequality, the transformation of the nobility into an even more closed privileged caste, a partial return to feudal fragmentation, or the transformation of absolutism into an open form of noble dictatorship. Whereas in England the phenomena of feudal reaction in the 13th–14th centuries were local in character and were overcome as bourgeois relations continued to grow, in other countries in the 16th–18th centuries feudal reaction acquired firmer footing. The phenomena of feudal reaction were most widely felt in Spain, Italy, France (second half of the 18th century), and Central and Eastern Europe. In a number of cases (in the eastern part of Germany, in Bohemia, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Russia) these phenomena took the form of what is called the "second edition of serfdom" — that is, the application of forms of personal dependence already abolished in other countries, in order to expand and intensify serfdom.
In Russia, Catherine II showed particular zeal in imposing semi-slave forms of serfdom and in extending it to a population that had previously been independent (despite her personal understanding of the historical dead end that serfdom represented) — and it is for this that present-day admirers of serfdom and noble dictatorship declare her "the Great." The development of capitalist relations of production, over time, leads to the transformation of the capitalist order into the leading or even the dominant one. The bourgeoisie begins to lay claim to a share in political power, above all in order to eliminate the vestiges of feudal relations that hold back the development of capitalism (estate inequality, the regulation of trade and industry, the exclusion of non-noble estates from shaping economic policy, the absence of a free land market, and so on).
The social revolution actually taking place — that is, the transition from predominantly feudal to predominantly bourgeois economic relations — is accompanied by the unfolding of political clashes between the bourgeoisie
продолжение следует...
Часть 1 Chapter 6 6.4.2. Classical (Developed) Feudalism
Часть 2 6.4.4. Peculiarities of Russian Feudalism - Chapter 6 6.4.2. Classical
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