Reason and Science in Danger.
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Aristocrats can become capitalists. You could insist that “bourgeois” must be applied to all capitalists, but there are many connotations to the word “bourgeois” that do not apply to Charles etc., any more than you can apply them to others enriched by capitalist enterprise. His son was not a bourgeois either, and he returned in 1660 to rule as king. Nor did he hold the subservient position to the bourgeoisie that the monarch did following 1688. Today we socialists might call the Queen a member of the bourgeoisie, but strictly speaking she is a capitalist who is an aristocrat.
Historical materialism is not undermined. Over-simplification is undermined. Have you come from a Leftist, SWP-type background?
You appear to want the Civil War to be the whole English Revolution, nice and neatly packed and finished, so that France and Russia and China in their turn can faithfully copy it.
I think you need to read more about the decline and break-up of feudalism before the 16th century, from the Black Death onward, and move beyond an over-dependence on Marx. That is not to say he is incorrect, just that he is not the only source of historical knowledge and cannot shed light on research since his death. Christopher Hill is brilliant, and I suggest he is not referring to the feudal age at all, but to vestiges of feudalism still lingering here and there. Rather like the few remaining serfs “freed” by Elizabeth in 1572, two centuries after serfdom. (That would have been during a land enclosure, and could be aptly summed up as “Right, you are free. Go somewhere else and die.”)
Read Engels Peasant War to see how Lutheran protestantism was embraced by feudal nobles opposing both Imperial Catholic nation-building and peasant revolutionary proto-socialism.
Capitalism had begun in the Mediterranean. The Templars ran a capitalist enterprise. Italy and Spain were more economically advanced (Kautsky) than England.
The Cistercians were employers of wage-labour (Terry Jones). That doesn’t make them “bourgeois.” They were also feudal landowners and the inspiration for the cartoon “idle, fat monk.”
A law abolished some remaining feudal details in 1925. Does that mean the Edwardians lived under feudalism?
I think it was Engels who referred to the Tudor monarch as “the national capitalist”?
https://images.app.goo.gl/wsQDkwCu6vfVACU1A
https://images.app.goo.gl/yAoaZGryXVah68iX7
Both essential reading.
‘Aristocrats can become capitalists.’
Does that mean that they are both at the same time? I take it to mean that they were a member of one class who transferred to another (as a member of the working class would upon winning the lottery). As a Marxist I define class by the relationship to the means of production. If you muddy these waters you end up with a sociology that declares that a more affluent section of the working class are ‘middle class’ – which is nonsense. I can accept that ‘bourgeois’ can have a broader meaning culturally but economically? We use the term ‘petit bourgeois’ to define a section of the working class whose income derives partly from profits and who politically identify with the capitalist 1%. Is this the kind of ‘complexity’ you speak of? I’ve been a member of the SPGB since 1980 which was instigated by my brother-in-law who was a professor of Russian history and who showed me the poverty of Lenin’s ideology compared with the materialism of Marx. I turned my back on the Left from that time.
So you want to say that England in 1642 was a feudal society?
OK, if it makes you happy.
I would hesitate to describe the landowners of the 18th and 19th centuries as capitalists. Some were that as well, but the classical political economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo analysed the capitalist economy as involving three classes: landowners who owned the land (whose income was ground rent), capitalists who invested capital (whose income was profit) and workers who produced wealth (whose income was wages).
Marx inherited and worked with this, identifying ground-rent as a levy on profits extracted from capitalists for the use of a portion of the Earth that landlords happened to monopolise. There was therefore a conflict of class interest between landowners and capitalists which played out on the political field in the 19th century, with the capitalist class gaining more and more political control until finally assuming full control with the emasculation of the House of Lords in 1910. Since then, I think it can be said, the landlord class has been absorbed into the capitalist class both through inter-marriage and through the investment of the proceeds of ground-rent in capitalist enterprises.
I would not say that the landlord class were feudal but that they were not part of the capitalist class. The royal family can be classified historically as members of this class rather than as capitalists. It would be interesting to know how much of the personal incomes of Charles I and Charles II came from ground rent as opposed to any profits from the commercial activities they might have happened to have been engaged in. Are there any studies on this?
Why would I want to say that? I just think that Charles I was a member of a decaying feudal nobility that had to be replaced by the capitalist class politically. At least this is what I have always believed but I will read the historians you suggest and review my understanding accordingly. I’m impressed by your confidence but it does seem to confront my understanding of what the class struggle means historically. Have you studied history at university?
Britannica.com
It seems Charles I relied on levying of taxes and fines for the most part. He was always strapped for cash.
The Royal armies cast a miserable appearance. It is related that men had to share breeches: one sleeping while another used his. Another anecdote has a royalist platoon fighting with sticks and stones against parliamentary musketeers and pikemen.
The dissolution of the Parliament of 1628 in 1629 and the king’s clear intention to govern for a period without this troublesome institution necessitated a reversal of policy. Over the next two years, peace treaties ended England’s fruitless involvement in Continental warfare in which more than £2 million had been wasted and royal government brought into disrepute. The king was also able to pacify his subjects by launching a campaign of administrative and fiscal reform that finally allowed the crown to live within its own revenues. Customs increased to £500,000 as both European and North American trade expanded. Under capable ministers such as Richard Weston, earl of Portland, prerogative income also increased. Ancient precedents were carefully searched to ensure that the crown received its full and lawful dues. Fines were imposed on those who had not come forward to be knighted at the king’s accession. These distraints of knighthood yielded more than £170,000. The boundaries of royal forests were resurveyed and encroachers fined. Fees in the court of wards were raised and procedures streamlined. With effort and application annual royal revenue reached £1 million.
The most important of Charles’s fiscal schemes was not technically a design to squeeze monies into the royal coffers. While the king’s own rights might underwrite the needs of government, they could do nothing toward maintaining the navy, England’s sole military establishment. Thus, Charles expanded the collection of ship money, an ancient levy by which revenue was raised for the outfitting of warships. Although ship money was normally only collected in the ports in times of emergency, Charles extended it to inland communities and declared pirates a national menace. At first there was little resistance to the collection of ship money, but, as it was levied year after year, questions about its legitimacy were raised. The case ofJohn Hampden (1637) turned upon the king’s emergency powers and divided the royal judges, who narrowly decided for the crown. But legal opinion varied so significantly that revenue dropped, and the stirring of a taxpayer revolt could be felt.
Charles II.
Parliament agreed to aid him in the Third Anglo-Dutch War and pay him a pension, and Charles secretly promised to convert to Catholicism at an unspecified future date.
The English Parliament granted him an annual income to run the government of £1.2 million,[27] generated largely from customs and excise duties. The grant, however, proved to be insufficient for most of Charles’s reign. For the most part, the actual revenue was much lower, which led to attempts to economise at court by reducing the size and expenses of the royal household[27] and raise money through unpopular innovations such as the hearth tax.[23]
(Wikipedia)Louis XIV also paid him a pension.
This is all I know.
If landlords relied on land rents etc., does this mean feudalism was still the system of society? That’s a big if, isn’t it? Serfdom was long gone. The peasantry, or the greater part of it, was evicted. Arable was turned to pasture. The land was enclosed. Feudalism had required land with people. Post-1535, people were no longer required. One or two shepherds can watch sheep. Large extended serf families have been replaced by much smaller numbers of waged tenants, with them being steadily evicted too. I think we have to distinguish different types of capitalist rather than saying the feudal system was still in place.
Seems that for Charles I, “L’Etat, c’est moi” and that’s what the “middling sort” was struggling against so that the state became them or at least their executive committee.
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