The Tudor revolution
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But this is unnecessary as an explanation of the English Revolution since nobody here denies that the bourgeoisie were in the forefront of it. The article from which the above quote comes also goes on to establish that an important element of the aristocracy who supported Charles were still dependent on feudal tenure.
A remnant of feudalism, not the feudal system of society.
And the bourgeoisie who supported the king, and the aristocrats who supported parliament … or doesn’t the Earl of Essex or the Earl of Manchester count?
And then there’s the second civil war, against the bourgeois Presbyterians. Are they not protestant enough?
And the bourgeoisie happy enough, so desperate for the king back, to throw the regicides to Charles II.
It was part of the revolution.
The Bourgeoisie needed stability and allowed Charles II back provided he accepted a deal where, with the exception of the regicides, he would rule with parliament (hence his confirming the abolition of feudal tenure upon his return).
The problem is not whether or not by 1640 the capitalist mode of produced had largely replaced feudalism as production by serfs tied to the land — obviously it had, otherwise those in favour of it developing would have had no material basis for their struggle — but which class (if any) the Charles I regime represented.
Here’s how the two authors of the book describe the problem (without necessarily agreeing with it; nor do I):
“In examining the character of class conflicts in the making of the first ‘stage’ in the English Revolution, the ‘Great Revolution’ of 1640, traditional Marxist explanations of the Civil War have focused on the role of the rising gentry, conceived as an emerging bourgeois class. The two sides in the Civil War, parliamentary forces and royalists, are thus conceived as the agents of two opposing classes representing antagonistic modes of production: a rising capitalism and declining feudalism. This interpretation has not fared well with the more contemporary historiography and has been largely abandoned. A problem with it has been the difficulty in identifying the continuing existence of a distinctly feudal class to which the rising capitalist bourgeoisie was opposed. For by the time of the English Civil War, the ruling landed classes were, according to Robert Brenner, ‘by and large – though not of course uniformly – capitalist, in the sense of depending on commercial farmers paying competitive rents, rather than one that was sharply divided into advanced and backward sectors’.”
They go on to add:
“Yet the extent of Brenner’s depiction of such a thoroughgoing capitalist transformation of pre-revolutionary England society remains open to much debate. Henry Heller, for example, has pointed out that the nobility in northwest England remained an outpost of feudal reaction, and that this area was a royalist stronghold throughout the period.”
I don’t think these reactionary nobles could be described as being part of the bourgeoisie, so I don’t go along with the idea that the Civil War was between two sections of the bourgeoisie. But was Charles ruling on their behalf? Of course they supported him but they can’t have been much help in solving the financial difficulties of his state.
Charles was personally anti-enclosure and enamoured of the past. The north-west (but not Manchester), Wales, Cornwall, Ireland and Gaelic Scotland were with him. So was Oxford, his capital.
But Essex and other aristocrats led parliament’s armies against him. The Presbyterian parliamentarians were religious fanatics, which Charles’ supporters were not. The advance of Royalist forces put an end to witch-hunting.
A blog post suggesting this discussion may be more relevant than it thinks:
https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2020/10/on-feudal-exploitation.html
The revolution had been in progress since 1485, one might say before, and those holding the old feudal lands were not the old nobility but royal appointees and purchasers.
I thought we had reached a consensus that “revolution” had a political sense as a more or less rapid change in political control whereas the better word for what you have just referred to would be “evolution”, a gradual socio-economic change that eventually prepares the ground for a political revolution (as happened in 1640).
Otherwise we start to go round in circles again.
I haven’t read all of this thread, but it seems a bit odd describing early capitalists in England as “bourgeoise” since they were tenant farmers operating in a rental market, not middle-class urban merchants. This was the key discussion in the Brenner debate; whether the genesis of capitalism is in an outgrowth in mercantilism or whether it was more to do with a specific set of property relations that originally only existed in the English countryside. Apologies if this has already been touched upon. “Bourgeois” and “capitalist” are not necessarily synonyms.
I understand that revolution is the change or transformation from one economical system into a new or another economical system, a reformist revolt is not a revolution, it is just an evolution, therefore, a protest in the streets is a revolution, and that is one of the mistakes of the leftwinger who call revolutions any type of uprising, as the SPGB wrote several years ago different to the claim of the Leninists, the German and French workers uprising was not a revolution, something that was expected by the Leninist in the Soviet Union and they became isolated and created the concept of socialism in one country, the creator of that concept was not Stalin, it was Nikolai Bukharin
That blog post that YMS put up shows how in popular parlance “feudalism” has come to be associated with open robbery of the producers as opposed to the more subtle and not so obvious robbery that capitalism brings about by the operation of its economic laws. A consequence of the ideological victory of the Intellectual champions of the rising bourgeoisie over their opponents, the defenders of feudalism.
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