The Tudor revolution
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Yes, I think the title deeds to my house say that I own the land in “fee simple”. I think that in theory all land in England still ultimately belongs to the Crown.
Peoples in the USA think that they own a house, but they do not own anything, they rent a real estate property to a bank for 30/40 years and then the state continue owning the land and they must continue paying to the state until they die, otherwise, they will face foreclosure or a lien in the property, those are feudal law, there is nothing modern about that. In some so-called third world countries peoples own the property and the land and they do not have to pay to any bank at all, so where is the spreading of the so-called European feudalism? The term real estate comes from Royal or royalty
China or the Tibet is not the only place where peasants have lost their lands. Millions of black peoples in the USA who inherited lands have lost them, in the Caribbeans most peasants have lost their small pieces of lands, and they have been sold or expropriated for large agricultural corporations, and the peasants have moved to the cities or they have emigrated to others countries, most of the large emigrations and caravan from Central Americas to the USA are peasants who have lost their small pieces of lands, and they are not serfs. Peoples living in front of the rivers and beaches have been kicked out for tourism Most of the cities of the State of California have Spanish names because they were lands owned by Mexican landlords or families. The Chinese government can use the expression of feudal but they are inheriting the same mistakes of the Maoists and the leftwingers, we must go deep into the roots of the problems
Feudal Tenure was abolished in 1645 and Charles II was obliged to confirm this in 1660. Perhaps this was an arrangement with the bourgeoisie to facilitate his return? The fact that socage represented a phase within decaying feudalism fits nicely with the events of 1642.
But political seizure of government by the capitalist class doesn’t always come by them actively doing the seizing. In Japan it was handed to them by the Meiji throne. In China and Russia it fell to a new bourgeoisie formed of Bolshevik and ex-Bolshevik leaders, and later, new entrepreneurs emerging from the termination of Bolshevik state-capitalism.
Yes I agree TM but my point is that whether or not the capitalists seize power this presupposes the prior existence of capitalist relations of production and hence a capitalist class. In other words a gradualistic development in which the forces of production come into open conflict with the existing relations of production in what is called a revolution, In Russia capitalism did not begin with the Bolsheviks constituting themselves as a “new bourgeoise”. Rather they stepped into the shoes vacated by the old bourgeoisie whose businesses were mainly nationalised. Capitalism in Russia was already developing when the Bolsheviks came on the scene. Some of its capitalist manufacturing plants such as the Putilov works were among the largest and most modern in the world and foreign capitalists – particularly from France – had invested heavily in Tsarist Russia
This is why I was critical of Wez’s comment
The priority of most reactionary historians is to destroy or at least undermine the Marxist theory of class struggle generating historical change. Your ‘gradualist’ theory of history is one of their favourite tactics and so you must forgive me for being suspicious of its credibility
There is absolutely no contradiction whatsoever between a gradualist theory of history such as I have described above and a Marxist theory of class struggle generating historical change. In fact the latter doesn’t make much sense without the former which posits cumulative quantitative changes – which are by definition gradualistic – bringing about , or making necessary, a qualitive rupture in society which is what we tend to mean by “revolution”
Robbo, of course the gradual evolution of capitalism within feudalism is the origin of the capitalist class – nobody here is denying that. What I do deny is that the events of 1642 represented a struggle between elements of the capitalist class which would deprive it of its revolutionary nature as the climax of a class struggle.
Matt, it is moreorless a re-post from our blog the Socialist Courier which has extensively researched the pattern of land-ownership in Scotland and how the Scottish noble families still maintains control over the affairs in Scotland with a finger in every pie.
https://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2012/05/scottish-common-ownership.html
The original sources being
<b>SOURCES
http://www.scottishcommons.org/docs/commonweal_1.pdf
http://www.scottishcommons.org/docs/commonweal_2.pdf
http://www.scottishcommons.org/docs/commonweal_3.pdf</b>Professor Cosmo Innes (1798-1874), Advocate and Professor of Constitutional Law and History wrote in his Scotch Legal Antiquities,
“Looking over our country, the land held in common was of vast extent. In truth, the arable – the cultivated land of Scotland, the land early appropriated and held by charter – is a narrow strip on the river bank or beside the sea. The inland, the upland, the moor, the mountain were really not occupied at all for agricultural purposes, or served only to keep the poor and their cattle from starving. They were not thought of when charters were made and lands feudalised. Now as cultivation increased, the tendency in the agricultural mind was to occupy these wide commons, and our lawyers lent themselves to appropriate the poor man’s grazing to the neighbouring baron. They pointed to his charter with its clause of parts and pertinents, with its general clause of mosses and moors – clauses taken from the style book, not with any reference to the territory conveyed in that charter; and although the charter was hundreds of years old, and the lord had never possessed any of the common, when it came to be divided, the lord got the whole that was allocated to the estate, and the poor cottar none. The poor had no lawyers.”From another blog-post related to this thread
…The landowning establishment among Scotland’s elite continue to have their links into financial and money-making circles, as well as considerable cultural power. The “mighty magnates” of 19th century Scotland – the men (and some women) who headed the great houses – were essentially a rentier rather than an entrepreneurial class, making their money from rents and investments. They were sufficiently astute to invest in the new industrial capitalism which ran Scotland economically and politically for so long, while being strongly represented on the boards of the major banks and finance houses. At the turn of the century, The Marquess of Linlithgow, for example, was a director of the Bank of Scotland, and Standard Life; the Duke of Buccleuch, of the Royal Bank, Standard Life and Scottish Equitable; the Earl of Mansfield, of the National Bank, and Scottish Equitable; and the Marquess of Tweeddale, of the Commercial Bank, Edinburgh Life, and Scottish Widows. Such hegemony has, of course, eroded significantly with the decline of indigenous Scottish capitalism and its replacement with multinational corporations. Nevertheless, the banks and finance houses still find it useful to have titled property represented on the board. …
Again, this is a very interesting thread of history, but i do feel it neglects the relevance to workers of today. At least the blog relates the past to the current purchases of land by the community. The latest being in the Borders from the estate of the Duke of Buccleuch
<i>”everyone has a right to a deer from the hill, a tree from the forest, and a salmon from the river” – </i>An old Highland saying
The stageist conception of history may be viewed from a distance but close-up there were anomalies
Coal miners in Scotland, and their families, were bound to the colliery in which they worked and the service of its owner. This bondage was set into law by an Act of Parliament in 1606, which ordained that “no person should fee, hire or conduce and salters, colliers or coal bearers without a written authority from the master whom they had last served”. The cruel edict reduced the Scottish collier to the position of a serf or a slave. By that Act, workmen in mines, whether miners, pickmen, winding-men, firemen, or in any other service of the mine, were prohibited from leaving that service either in hope of greater gain or of greater ease, or for any other reason, without the consent of the coal-owner, or of the Sheriff of the County; and any one receiving a runaway into his service and refusing to return him within twenty-four hours was to be fined one hundred pounds Scots. A collier lacking such written authority could be “reclaimed” by his former master “within a year and a day”. If the new master did not surrender the collier, he could be fined and the collier who deserted was considered to be a thief and punished accordingly. The Act also gave the coal owners and masters the powers to to apprehend “vagabonds and sturdy beggars” and put them to work in the mines. A further Act of 1641 extended those enslaved to include other workers in the mines and forced the colliers to work six days a week. The Habeas Corpus Act of Scotland, in 1701, which declared that “the imprisonment of persons without expressing the reasons thereof, and delaying to put them to trial is contrary to law”; and that “no person shall hereafter be imprisoned for custody in order to take his trial for any crime or offence without a warrant or writ expressing the particular cause for which he is imprisoned” specifically stated “that this present Act is in no way to be extended to colliers and salters.”
It wasn’t until 1799 when an Act was passed that all colliers in Scotland were “to be free from their servitude”.
The Socialist Party has also covered the conditions of the Tibetians, but it is focussed on the present conditions, and how they are exploited as wage slaves and how they are exploited and oppressed by a group of religious parasites and by the Chinese capitalist ruling class. The Dai Lama is a parasite who does not work and he lives like a kind and sometimes he makes tours around the world in order to collect money
Wez, I am not saying the capitalist class did not come into power, just that they don’t always seize it.
The nobility were broken in 1485, leaving power to roll like Richard’s crown into the hands of one man, Henry Tudor, who wooed the bourgeoisie, favoured them, and completed the destruction of what had been his class of origin: abolishing feudal liveries and private armies and consolidating an autocracy that at the time furthered bourgeois interests as well as his own.
By 1642 autocracy had become an obstacle to the capitalists of the towns and ports, and also to many involved in agriculture. So they challenged the king. This certainly was a political revolution, but it was the overthrow of the royal autocracy, not of the long dead feudal system of society – although feudal vestiges of law and tenure still existed, mixed with a landlord capitalism.
The power is not on the top or on the superstructure, the power is at the bottom, wherever owns the means of productions has the power, we don’t have the power because we do not control the means of productions, if we take the means of productions from the hands of the parasite class we have the power and we do not need a superstructure when we obtain the proper political consciousness we can do that, and the bourgeoise will last less than a roach in a chicken nest. Every president has his/her own boss
Exactly, Robbo.
But Wez is not denying that, only opposing gradualism in the place of political revolution.
My point is, why seize power when it falls into your hands without a fight?
The parliament did defy Charles and defeat him. But he was no longer in power when the war began. They were. The war was one of defence by the new parliamentary government against an outlaw king’s army.
The Russian bourgeoisie had indeed begun the political revolution in February 1917, and had then fled with their man Kerensky. So the developing of capitalism was supervised by the Bolsheviks.
In Japan feudal lords overthrew the feudal government in the name of xenophobia. The bourgeoisie hadn’t taken part but would eagerly take up Meiji’s need for industrialization, militarization and modernization. Of the feudal lords who had actually toppled the Shogunate, some would become capitalists while most followed the pro-shogunate clans into oblivion.
In China the national bourgeoisie had high hopes of Chiang, and had formerly initiated the 1911 uprising, but their hopes were dashed. The further development of capitalism became the task of peasant leaders, namely the “Communist” Party.
TM
Have you read the works of Mao Tse Tung? The Communist Party of China was not only composed of peasants, they also had intellectuals and industrial workers. Many leaders of the Communist Party of China believed that they were able to skip capitalism, in the same way, that Leon Trotsky and his followers believed that the workers were able to skip capitalism. I do not know where you are getting your information from, because they are not accurate, the revolution in China was not made by the party, it was made by the peasants, even more, during the Bolshevik revolution, Lenin himself said that the workers were ahead and the party was behind. The CPC published a pamphlet on the 1911 revolution and it was propagated by China Books and Periodicals, Peking Review and Peking Publications
TM where do you get such confidence? This debate has gone on among historians since the event itself. The idea that the king’s army was a band of ‘outlaws’ sounds absurd to me. The country was split down the middle and some historians estimate that 250,000 people died during the period making the French revolution look like a bar brawl. And this was all down to the king and his band of outlaws? I believe it to be the first of the great revolutions in Europe that eventually created global capitalism. Until I’m provided with evidence to the contrary I still believe it was primarily a struggle between the rising bourgeoisie and the decaying remains of feudalism incarnated in the king and his conservative land owners together with some renegade capitalists. If Mary Tudor hadn’t died prematurely we would have endured a counter reformation for which she enjoyed great support from the English ancien regime.
I have not seen any moment or event where TM has given any historical credit to the working class and to the class struggle but he has given a lot of credit to kings and personalities is that the materialist conception of history ? I doubt it isn’t the class struggle and materialist conception of history the main two pillars of the socialist party case ?
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