The Birth of Capitalism

A 21st Century Perspective

Henry Heller

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781783714605
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Economics

In the light of the deepening crisis of capitalism and continued non-Western capitalist accumulation, Henry Heller re-examines the debates surrounding the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe and elsewhere. Focusing on arguments about the origin, nature and sustainability of capitalism, Heller offers a new reading of the historical evidence and a critical interrogation of the transition debate. He advances the idea that capitalism must be understood as a political as well as an economic entity. This book breathes new life into the scholarship, taking issue with the excessively economistic approach of Robert Brenner, which has gained increasing support over the last ten years. It concludes that the future of capitalism is more threatened than ever before. The new insights in this book make it essential reading for engaged students and scholars of political economy and history.

1

THE DECLINE OF FEUDALISM

This chapter reviews the debates on the decline of feudalism and origins of capitalism, beginning with the foundational exchange between Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezy. The two differed primarily over whether an external prime mover, namely the development of commerce with the Mediterranean and the Middle East, or factors internal to feudalism caused the decline of this mode of production. Sweezy argued that commerce overseas served as an external prime mover which undermined feudalism. Dobb and others, including the medievalist Rodney Hilton and the Japanese historian Kohachiro Takahashi, argued that an internal prime mover – the crisis of the feudal mode of production – caused the decline. Meanwhile Eric Hobsbawm, another participant in the debate, insisted that changes in Europe had to be seen in terms of uneven development on a global scale. The decline of feudalism and advance toward capitalism came about through a series of crises that saw previously developed areas of Europe and the rest of the world regress while other regions forged ahead. England emerged at the forefront of this movement.

In the original debate class struggles were recognized as important in feudalism’s decline. Subsequent argument centred on Brenner’s contention that these class struggles determined not only the decline of feudalism, but the genesis of capitalism. In England, according to Brenner, such conflicts paradoxically led to serfdom’s decline but also the landlords’ ongoing grip on the land. In the sixteenth century the latter initiated agrarian capitalism by forcing the better-off among the cautious peasantry to take up competitive leases. Based on the work of Guy Bois, Terence Byres and Chris Harman, we reject Brenner’s argument. Far from being conservative, petty producers and not landlords took the lead in not only dismantling feudalism, but initiating capitalism through their ongoing political and social struggles and their economic enterprise. In accord with a forces of production approach, furthermore, we insist that the economic and political capacity of this class of proto-capitalists has to be understood in terms of the previous development of the forces of production during the Middle Ages.

Perry Anderson’s account of the role of the state shapes our view as well. He points out that faced with revolt from below, the only way that class society survived was through the building-up of the territorial state. Despite its feudal framework the early modern state provided an essential container for the emergence of capitalism. Dobb and Brenner’s views of the transition are the focal points of this chapter. Yet their viewpoint is marred by an unfortunate economism and in the latter’s case a class determinism. In response we use the work of Hobsbawm, Anderson and Harman to provide a more dialectical view of the transition from feudalism. Hobsbawm’s sense of unequal development, Anderson’s view of the dual class character of the emerging territorial state and Harman’s notion of social class as defined economically but also culturally and politically help to provide this more dialectical sense. These debates cover the chief issues relating to the transition from feudalism, and form the essential basis for understanding debates discussed later in the text.

DOBB’S OPENING GAMBIT

Maurice Dobb was a don at Cambridge throughout his career. He was an economist by training, and founded the discipline of Marxist political economy in Britain. He also helped to mentor a strong left-wing student movement during the 1930s. As a communist he was more or less isolated from other academics especially in his own discipline, though the development economist and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen has recently written that ‘he was undoubtedly one of the outstanding political economists of this [twentieth] century.’¹

Dobb justified his intrusion into history by suggesting that economists could put interesting questions to historical data; that the facts of concrete history could be illuminated by economic theory. At the same time he argued that economic analysis makes sense and is fruitful only if tied to the study of historical development.² His Studies in the Development of Capitalism, published immediately after the Second World War, was based on thorough knowledge of the then existing historiography on the decline of English feudalism and emergence of capitalism.

Dobb based his approach to the transition from feudalism to capitalism on Marx’s notion of the mode of production.³ While he recognized that one mode of production dominated a given epoch, he also accepted that elements of other modes of production could coexist with the dominant mode.⁴ In the passage from the feudal mode of production to the capitalist mode, Dobb singled out three decisive moments – the crisis of feudalism in the fourteenth century, the beginning of capitalism in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution.⁵ The decline of feudalism and start of capitalism are separated by at least two centuries. The capitalist mode proper dates from the latter half of the sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century, when capital began to penetrate production to a considerable degree.⁶

Modern discussions of feudalism have been plagued by long-drawn-out controversies over its conceptualization. These disputes have centred on whether feudalism should be thought of in essentially political and legal or socio-economic terms.⁷ As a Marxist Dobb adopted the third perspective while trying not to not lose sight of the political. According to him, the feudal mode is defined as the extra-economic extraction by overlords of rents or services from a class of subsistence producers. The peasant producers largely control the process of production but are not legally free. Feudalism and serfdom are synonymous.⁸ The rise of the political and economic autonomy of the corporate towns, followed immediately by the economic decline of the fourteenth century, marked the crisis of the feudal mode, which was deeply shaken and thereafter continued to weaken. According to Dobb, towns had some part in the decline of feudalism, playing a role in the late medieval revolts, providing refuges to runaway serfs and serving as oases of freedom.⁹ But the confrontation between peasants and landlords in the countryside was the main arena of struggle. At the end of the Middle Ages serfdom had vanished while medieval forms of government and the class power of landlords lingered on in a kind of historical twilight.

Though the peasantry as a class had grown stronger, they remained subject to manorial authority. The emerging class of hired labourers was subject to a good deal of coercion as a stratum which resorted to wage labour as a supplement to a livelihood still mainly drawn from subsistence farming.¹⁰ The merchant bourgeoisie became more powerful but cooperated for the most part with the landlords. The novel element lay among urban craftspeople and well-to-do and middling peasants, whose particular mode of production had become independent of feudalism. They were petty producers who were not yet capitalists, but certainly contained a potential to become so, or who began to come under the external influence of capital.¹¹ In Dobb’s conception it was this petty mode of production which predominated economically in the two hundred or so years between the beginning of the feudal crisis and the advent of the capitalist mode in the mid-sixteenth century.

Until Dobb it was generally assumed that the intensification of market exchange and the growing role of money brought about the decline of feudalism. On the contrary, Dobb demonstrated that money and exchange actually strengthened serfdom and feudalism.¹² The emergence of merchant capital was fully compatible with feudalism. Rather it was the economic weakness of the feudal mode of production, coupled with the growing need of the ruling class for revenue, which was responsible for the system’s crisis.¹³ The lack of incentive to toil and the low level of technique placed a limit on peasant productivity. The further development of productive forces was fettered by upper-class exploitation.

Upper-class demands on peasants expanded inordinately due to the expansion of its numbers, the stimulus of luxury consumption and the exigencies of war and brigandage. This ‘parasitic’ ruling class expanded through natural increase as well as the growth in the size of great lords’ retinues in competition with one another. The rivalry between leading nobles increased spending on feasts, luxury commodities and pageants. Competition extended to war-making, the nobility’s raison d’être and its most important form of conspicuous consumption. All this increased economic demands on producers.¹⁴

The result was economic exhaustion, flight from the land and peasant rebellion.¹⁵ Over-exploitation and stagnant productivity resulted in a decline in population after 1300. Subsequent labour shortages, peasant resistance or threat of flight led to widespread commutation of labour to money rent. The manorial system was further weakened by the thinning of the ranks of the nobility through war, the growing practice of leasing demesne, the emergence of a stratum of rich and middling peasants differentiated from the mass of peasant poor, and the growing use of wage labour. By the end of the fifteenth century the economic basis of the feudal system had disintegrated.¹⁶

The late medieval social differentiation of the peasantry, a key theme of Dobb’s work, prepared the way for the later dispossession of the mass of peasants. The subsequent spread of vagabondage across England and the rest of Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century was widely commented upon by anxious contemporaries. The appearance of this rootless population heralded the arrival of capitalism, setting the stage for the emergence of capitalist wage labour. The role of the towns was above all to act as a magnet attracting the unfree rural population and forcing further concessions from the landed class.¹⁷

Dobb’s perspective on the role of the towns was later to be contested. What proved enduring was his view of the feudal crisis on the land. Dobb explained that the collapse of feudalism was the result of its own internal contradictions, stemming from the over-exploitation of the peasant producers: ‘it was the inefficiency of Feudalism as a system of production, coupled with the growing needs of the ruling class for revenue, that was primarily responsible for its decline; since this need for additional revenue prompted an increase in the pressure on the producer to a point where this pressure became literally unendurable’.¹⁸

Dobb’s interpretation of the decline of feudalism set off the celebrated transition debate. As the repressive machinery of the Cold War closed in, leading Marxist scholars mainly from England and the United States calmly undertook an analysis of the historical foundations of the capitalist system. The subsequent debate unfolded largely in the pages of the well-known journal Science and Society during the early 1950s. It then appeared as a booklet whose publication was arranged by Dobb in London in 1954.¹⁹ Widely ignored in the English-speaking countries, the debate was chiefly followed in countries where strong currents of Marxism persisted.²⁰ The contributions to the discussion were eventually collected, expanded and published in 1976 by one of the participants, Rodney Hilton.²¹

DOBB VERSUS SWEEZY

Paul Sweezy, another celebrated Marxist economist and co-founder with Paul Baran of the Monthly Review, was first into the fray.²² Sweezy agreed with Dobb that serfdom was the dominant relation of production in Western feudalism. But organized around the economically autarchic manor feudalism was a mode of production for use, and as such tended to stagnation.²³ An external force, the growth of trade and increase in production for exchange, was what was necessary to destabilize the system: ‘he [Dobb] mistakes for immanent trends certain historical developments which in fact can only be explained as arising from causes external to the system.’²⁴ Dobb failed to acknowledge sufficiently that the over-exploitation of peasants by the nobles arose from their increasing appetite for eastern luxury commodities. Sweezy’s view of an external prime mover was to prove untenable, as the ensuing debate demonstrated that the prime mover was internal to the feudal system. On the other hand, his view forced the participants in the controversy to address the fundamental question of the historic dynamic behind the evolution of the feudal mode of production.

Dobb for one rejected Sweezy’s view that feudalism tended toward stagnation, and insisted that it had its own momentum based on its internal – especially class – contradictions.²⁵ Class conflict between peasants and lords did not directly lead to capitalism. What it did was to lessen the dependence of the petty mode of production upon feudal overlordship, eventually freeing the petty producer from feudal exploitation. Sweezy’s trade-driven external prime mover did not hold up in the face of Dobb’s historically and theoretically better informed view of feudalism as an internally dynamic system driven by economic growth and class conflict.

While placing greater emphasis on internal factors, Dobb also considered the growth of trade a factor:

I am by no means denying that the growth of market towns and trade played an important role in accelerating the disintegration of the old mode of production. What I am asserting is that trade exercised its influence to the extent that it accentuated the internal conflicts within the old mode of production.²⁶

It was not a case of having to choose one factor to the exclusion of the other but rather consideration of their dialectical interaction.²⁷ Moreover, Dobb made more explicit than earlier that towns and therefore trade must be understood as internal rather than external to the feudal system.²⁸

Sweezy criticized Dobb for not signalling the existence of a system of pre-capitalist commodity production which was neither feudal nor capitalist in the wake of feudalism’s demise.²⁹ This was simply not the case. Dobb had sketched out a prolonged period at the end of the Middle Ages in which the petty mode of production dominated the economy. At the same time he more strongly asserted his earlier stated view that the ruling class remained feudal and that the state continued to be its instrument in the sixteenth century.³⁰

TAKAHASHI AND HILTON

The debate on the transition was then taken up by the distinguished Japanese Marxist economic historian Kohachiro Takahashi.³¹ Economic history and Marxism having been banned from Japan during the war, Takahashi’s intervention represented the renewal of the ties between the re-emergent tradition of Marxist thought in Japan and that of Europe and the United States. Takahashi insisted in the first place that the debate be widened beyond the English case to include Continental Europe. Presciently he held out the prospect that such a wider debate might then illuminate the transition question in Asia.³²

Takahashi rejected Sweezy’s conception of feudalism as a mode of production for use rather than exchange. Commodities are produced and circulate in different modes of production including the feudal. In a definition of the feudal or other modes stress should be placed above all on how products are produced.³³ As such Takahashi strongly supported Dobb’s view that the decline of feudalism was due to an internal rather than an external prime mover. But according to Takahashi, Dobb’s definition of feudalism was inadequate in that he immediately started from the abstractions of feudal landed property and serfdom. But just as Marx began his analysis of capital from the commodity, so likewise the analysis of feudalism had to begin from the fundamental social units of Western feudalism: t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction: problems and methods
• 1 The decline of feudalism
• 2 Experiments in capitalism: Italy, Germany, France
• 3 English capitalism
• 4 Bourgeois revolution
• 5 Political capitalism
• 6 The Industrial Revolution: Marxist perspectives
• 7 Capitalism and world history
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index