The Tudor revolution
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TM.
Your posts were stuck in ‘pending’ owing to the large number of links in them and when they didn’t show, you duplicated them, instead of alerting me to them not showing.
If a post does not show please don’t duplicate it, click on ‘Forum’ – ‘Contact forum admin‘.
It is best to just provide just some text and a single link into the sources as I have set this software this to reject any more than a couple of links for users security reasons.
Ok. But dig out some stuff about the structure of Chinese society in 1600 AD (rather than BC) and later so we can have some information on which to make a judgement. It would also be useful to know how you would define “feudalism”. If it’s any pre- or non-capitalist society based on a landed ruling class exploiting those who work the land then we will know.
Ok Matt. Will do that in future. Thanks.
I don’t know whether we can apply the word feudalism here or not. I always assumed the standard socialist analysis applied to China as well.
Japan is always referred to as feudal, because its Emperor was non-existent politically since the 12th c. But the merchants flourished since 1603, if only internally or through the Dutch, and Edo was bigger than London. And it was a centralised power.
China was a centralised power under the Manchus. The throne kept provincial authority submissive. But as soon as things begin to crumble, warlords come out of every province and corner.
Chinese history is replete with local aristocrats defying the Emperor and being punished. Plenty of them try their hand. Are they ‘feudals’? I don’t know.
Japan is not an issue. It did seem to have a system of decentralised war lords equivalent to Europe’s feudal barons.
Chins seems to have been more centralised ruled by a powerful emperor and a bureaucracy. Were the mandarins landowners? Was one of the tasks of the Emperor or them to maintain irrigation systems?
Mandarin as far as I know is merely an official of any kind, the lowest being county magistrate.
Shouldn’t we open a new thread?
Theoretically, any peasant, anyone at all, had the chance to take examinations and become a mandarin. It was a case of coming up with the money. Every peasant boy went to school in Imperial China, unless really destitute.
Thanks for that important link. It shows that there is a good case against calling it feudalism. Also confirms what I said about the so-called “Marxist“ view being that of Stalinism for political reasons — not wanting to have an Asiatic Mode of Production as this was too close to home.
Basic schooling, it seems, was free in Imperial China.
But it wasn’t what we would call school. No maths, geography or science. Just recitation of the Confucian classics, which was enough to enter the lowest exams.
Wu Ch’ing Tzu’s The Scholars is a novel about the examination system.
delinquent (Noun) One who disobeys or breaks rules or laws.
delinquent (Noun) a term applied to royalists by their opponents in the English Civil War 1642 – 1645.
Confirms outlaw status of the Cavaliers!
I see from something Wez has found (chapter 6 of this book) that I have been/am a “consequentialist” without knowing it, i.e have been arguing that the important thing about a political revolution that removes obstacles to capitalist development is not so much who carries out the revolution or what their intentions are but the outcome.
Anyway, here’s how that view is explained:
“While the bourgeoisie did in fact play some role in the classical revolutions, as we examine below, this agent-centred conceptualisation of bourgeois revolutions is itself unnecessary, if not unhelpful. Rather than looking at the intentions or composition of the agents involved in the making of revolutions, there is a veritable tradition of thinking (Marxist and non-Marxist) that conceptualises revolutions in terms of their socio-economic and political consequences. The most significant factor for this ‘consequentialist’ school of thought in classifying a revolution as ‘bourgeois’ is whether or not it removed the sociopolitical and ideological ‘obstacles’ (notably, the pre-capitalist state) to the development and consolidation of capitalism thereby establishing the state as an autonomous site of capital accumulation. For ‘f the definition of a bourgeois revolution is restricted to the successful installation of a legal and political framework in which the free development of capitalist property relations is assured’, Gareth Stedman Jones writes, ‘there is then no necessary reason why a “bourgeois revolution” need be the direct work of a bourgeoisie’. Bourgeois revolutions are therefore best understood ‘not as revolutions consciously made by capitalist agents’, but in terms of their developmental outcomes: revolutions that in one form or another promote the further development of capitalism. This then shifts the definitional content of the concept from the class that makes the revolution to the effects a revolution has in promoting and/or consolidating a distinctly capitalist form of state, which will in turn benefit the capitalist class irrespective of any role it played in the revolution. Bourgeois or capitalist revolutions therefore denote a sociopolitical transformation – ‘a change in state power, which is the precondition for large scale capital accumulation and the establishment of the bourgeoisie as the dominant class’.
I’ll go with that. I doubt most were thinking “This is our historic role in accord with the materialist conception of history.”
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