On 4/23/07, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
In chapter one of Andre Gunder Frank's "World Accumulation 1492-1789", I stumbled across this quote from Engels's "Peasant Wars in Germany":
I will have more to say on this in the weeks to come, as I return once again to the "transition" debate, but it should be obvious that Engels's take on the transition from capitalism to feudalism is starkly opposed to Brenner's.
That's partly or largely because Brenner could benefit from generations of scholarship on these questions that followed Engels' sketch. There is a lot of debate about the "transition from feudalism to capitalism" but I'd say that most of the literature nowadays rejects the idea that the shortage of gold before 1492 was driving feudalism into the ground. It's true it did motivate people -- like Columbus -- to seek out new supplies of gold, but it also encourage kings to water down the currency using lead and the like. And the price revolution that followed 1492 wasn't very important to real social relations in Europe. As I understand it, and I'm no expert (relying more on Marc Bloch's FEUDAL SOCIETY than on Brenner), the main problem was that Western European "feudalism" was an extremely decentralized organization that arose from the ruins of the Roman empire. It was a very mixed system, less of a mode of a production than what the Althusserians called a "social formation." The decentralization involved the constant wars between diverse mini-princes and assorted thugs. Serfs -- where there was serfdom -- "paid" for their "lords" protection from other lords with different sorts of forced labor. Some lords -- often called "kings" -- often united various parcels to try to become absolutist monarchs, but often had a hard time dealing with challenges from other lords and their own tendency toward pomp and waste. The problem with this system (and here I follow Brenner more) is that the system wasn't organized toward producing goods and services as much as to redistribute them between the various lords (and waste them in war). When population grew, so that _per capita_ living standards fell, that simply encouraged the "lords" to forcibly squeeze their serfs and tributary peasants. This didn't solve the problem of living standards but encouraged the Black Plague and peasant revolts. Eventually, this encouraged the collapse of the old system; this was also encouraged by the winning of hegemony over the other lords by kings in places like what is now called England. With the king maintaining order relatively successfully, the military function of the lords (and many of their serfs) shrank, so some of them shifted to more commercial ways, via the Enclosure Movement and the like. (With a lord not needing his own army, as Tawney pointed out, a lot of the serfs could be "let go.") The actual results depend on class struggle: in England, the lords and the rising class of landlords generally won, while in France the peasants did better (than in England) and were more likely to become smallholders. In CAPITAL, Marx describes the Enclosure Movement and the like as a one-sided class war by the upper classes, but scholars since them have put more emphasis on the plebeian resistance as affecting the result of the class war. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
