Reason and Science in Danger.
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TW I do not have a church in my mind, I questioned everything, even more, Karl Marx said: Question everything. I am not saying this or that, what I am saying is that we must be very careful with Harvey because he is always twisting Marx, the US left intellectuals like to twist everything. I am not a copy and paste person
Yes, TM, your namesake described well in the middle of the 16th century, what was going on at the time in his Utopia with “sheep eating people” as people were driven off the land to make way for sheep raising for wool to export, so creating one of the conditions for the development of capitalism — a landless proletariat.
The Tudor State made some attempts to deal with this, eg the Poor Law, but basically it was obliged to let capitalism develop. This doesn’t invalidate that in the end the autocratic state that the divine right of kings sanctioned proved to be an obstacle to the further development of capitalism. Hence the pressure to overthrow it in order to permit capitalism to spread more and more rapidly Hence in England the Civil War or English Revolution or whatever you want to call it, which resulted in the victory of what later in France was called the “bourgeoisie”.
The British Torquemada
I don’t need to be careful about Harvey. I am confident in my knowledge of Tudor history. I don’t follow Marx. If he is right he is right; wrong, then wrong. No one can “lead me astray” by twisting Marx. An historical fact is a fact. The Enclosures began in Henry VIII’s reign.
Yes, which resulted in the victory of the bourgeoisie, finalised in 1688. ,But the bourgeoisie did not overthrow feudalism in England. The Black Death and then the wars up to 1485 did that. 1485-1688 was the revolution. The civil war was just part of it, and it wasn’t the bourgeoisie overthrowing feudalism!
Yes, which resulted in the victory of the bourgeoisie, finalised in 1688. ,But the bourgeoisie did not overthrow feudalism in England. The Black Death and then the wars up to 1485 did that. 1485-1688 was the revolution. The civil war was just part of it, and it wasn’t the bourgeoisie overthrowing feudalism!
Was it the Peasants Revolt by Jack Straw, John Ball (a priest) etc?
The best English counterpart to Torquemada is William Cecil, a protestant. Or Elizabeth’s torturer, Topcliffe I believe his name was. And Thomas Cromwell, the agent of misery for thousands of people. A prize thug if ever there was one.
No. The peasants were defeated, thanks to the bourgeoisie ignoring the call to help them. It feared the peasants’ communism more than it hated the feudals.
Though I am no expert in this field, I do find Thomas’ account of things quite plausible. History does not come neatly packaged in stages. If a shorthand way of describing capitalism is the “wages system” (and Marx himself described capitalism in this way) then clearly labour service in the feudal sense of compulsory work on the manorial lord’s demesne was giving way to wage labour long before the 17th century – most particularly after the Black Death in the mid 14th century when wage rates increased sharply along with an increase in tenant farmers as the lords scrambled to secure a reliable income in the face of significant labour shortages (see for example M M Postan’s book “The Medieval Economy and Society”)
I am quite sympathetic to the “agrarian-origins-of-capitalism” school of thought, associated with individuals such as Ellen Meiksins Wood and Robert Brenner who emphasise the historical specificity of capitalism and locate its origins narrowly in a qualitative break in the structure of rural property relationship in England. It has often been contrasted with the trade-based or “commercialisation” school represented by the likes of Paul Sweezy, James Blaut and others who take a much less Eurocentric view of this whole subject and focuses on such things as the revenue derived from the slave trade. In fact, though these two different models may be, not so much opposed, as complementary.
And your bourgeois model, Marcos, wasn’t followed in Russia, China, or Japan either.
Just read this bit from Richard Wolff in his case that COVID-19 pandemic might have greater ramifications for capitalism
“In 14th century Europe, the black death pandemic began the end of feudalism because millions of serfs were too dead or too sick to produce the surpluses paid as rent to their feudal landlords,” writes Wolff. “That rent supported the entire political and cultural structures of European feudalism. They consequently crumbled and took the system down. Today, tens of millions of unemployed on top of all the dead and sick are likewise depriving our capitalist system of the surpluses, profits, etc. that support our political and cultural institutions. The disintegration of capitalism, especially where the death, sickness, and unemployment are worst (US) is furthest along.”
I might arrogantly say like youI know a lot about that process, it was my bread and butter I might also say that I do not know everything I am still learning Like Socrates said you can learn from a child too. Without Marx and Engels the process to learn would have been longer
Thanks Robbo.
We have to specify capitalism in England though, because capitalism existed already in a mercantile form in Italy and Spain, both economically ahead of England. The Lombard bankers were active since the 13th century, having a dispensation to practise usury in an era when it was a capital offence for Christians. Venice was a financial centre, profiting greatly from the Crusades, transporting the crusaders by sea in 1204. The Templars were super-rich venture capitalists as well as being monks.
🙂
“Merchant capitalism”, where those with money invested it in trading ventures which make a profit by buying cheap somewhere and then selling it at a higher price somewhere else, did precede capitalism as we know it — the investment in production by wage labour to make a profit out of the unpaid labour of the workers (what Marx translations into English call “surplus value”). But essentially as one of the ways in which the original (“primitive”) accumulation of money that was the other condition to a landless proletariat for the take-off of capitalism.
I am not sure, though, of the extent to which the money acquired by merchant capitalists was invested in capitalist production in Spain and what we now know as Italy. Wasn’t it rather lent to the rulers of absolutist states? Somebody must know.
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