Chapter 8 – On Transitions
The Property Question
In this chapter, Paul discusses the concept of mode of production, and the process of transition from one mode to another. Paul echoes some of the thoughts I have spelled out on these issues over the years. In considering a transition from capitalism to post-capitalism, Paul suggests examining the actual transition from feudalism to capitalism. He looks at what caused feudalism to falter, and thereby enabled capitalism to replace it. However, I think this still falls into the category of catastrophism, as a prime mover in historical development.
A large part of Paul's explanation for feudalism's faltering resides in the inability to raise agricultural productivity further, and on the Black Death, which decimated populations, and made labour scarce, causing the wages of labourers to rise sharply. But, Paul doesn't connect this to the fact that it led feudalism into solutions consistent with it as a mode of production.
Paul begins by considering the lessons of Shakespeare's history plays. The wars depicted between the various dukes and princes were the result of the intervention of money, Paul says, which means that a growing role of the market leads to the idea of mercenary armies replacing armies comprised of subjects, who serve on the basis of feudal obligation. But, this is fundamentally wrong. Feudalism itself comes into being precisely on the basis of these wars between dukes and princes. One of the most obvious examples is the Norman Conquest of Britain in 1066. And, of course, money has existed for thousands of years, long before either feudalism or capitalism.
Paul falls into this error, because he fails to locate correctly the actual basis of a mode of production. For feudalism, he says it is obligation, and for capitalism it is the market. It's these, he says, which lead to the reproduction of the social relations specific to each. However, the real basis of a mode of production is different. The basis of a mode of production, as Marx describes in Capital III, is the means by which surplus labour is pumped out of the producer. It comes down to a question of property, which is why, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx says the communists always raise the property question.
For slavery, the form of property that enables surplus labour to be pumped out is the ownership of slaves, for feudalism, it is ownership of land, and for capitalism it is ownership of capital. As soon as social productivity rises to a sufficient level that slaves can produce a surplus product, slavery becomes possible. The development is illustrated in the Bible by the story of Joseph and the Pharaoh, as peasants become increasingly impoverished, and have to sell off land, then their children, and eventually themselves. Once slave owning societies are established, one group wages wars against another to obtain slaves as the basis of increasing its wealth.
Under feudalism, it is ownership of land rather than slaves that is the dominant form of property. The independent peasant producer can produce a larger surplus product than the slave. For the feudal lord, the size of their surplus product depends on the area of land in their domain, and they, therefore, seek to expand the size of their domain.
For capitalism, the dominant form of property is capital. It is the employment of capital that is required for labour to be employed, and for surplus labour to be undertaken. Each capital is forced to expand, and to try to destroy its competitors, a fact that should be kept in mind in relation to Brexit, and Britain's relation to the EU, by those who expect it to be followed by harmony.
Under feudalism, when a village commune's population grew to a size where the existing allotment of plots was no longer adequate, a part of the uncultivated common land would be brought into cultivation. When this was no longer possible, the plot sizes themselves had to be reduced and redivided. Eventually, this reaches a limit given that productivity rose little under this peasant production. For individual princes, it means that their surplus gets squeezed, and the obvious answer is to acquire the land, peasants, and surplus of some other prince. For Kings, it means, as with William the Conqueror, taking over another kingdom entirely. The mediaeval handbook on how to go about that was produced by Niccolo Machiavelli, in “The Prince”. Colonisation of newly acquired principalities was a favoured strategy proposed by Machiavelli for holding on to them.
The concept of colonialism then is wholly consistent with feudalism as a mode of production. Firstly, the idea of simply taking possession of some virgin territory into which your own colons can settle and expand is entirely consistent with the way feudalism brought common land into cultivation, as population expanded. Secondly, the acquisition of additional land, the dominant form of property for feudalism, is entirely consistent with its basis of reproduction, from the extraction of rent.
Following on From Lenin's “Imperialism”, which effectively confuses colonialism with imperialism, in describing the dividing up of the globe, Leninists have tended to describe colonialism as a product of capitalism, but it was actually a product of feudalism. However, the idea that colonialism is the product of capitalism is not entirely wrong, just as Paul is not entirely wrong in what he says about the role of money, and the market. The existence of money and markets cannot be the primary factor, as Marx himself describes in Capital III, because commodity production and exchange, hence markets, dates back around 10,000 years. Money, of some form, arose not long after, as the universal equivalent form of value. And, as Marx says, both money-lending capital, and merchant capital come into existence thousands of years ago, as antediluvian forms of capital, operating inside the different modes of production, be it slavery, the Asiatic Mode of Production, or feudalism.
The payment of rents, initially in kind, rather than Labour Rent, and then as money rent, enables the landlord to consume the surplus product in the form of a much wider range of use values. As the towns develop, and result in the production of a much wider range of use values, sold as commodities, so these two things come together and reinforce each other. The merchants who come into existence at the dawn of commodity exchange, as one community sought to exchange its surplus products for those of other communities, are able to act as intermediaries between commodity producers in the towns and landlords with money to spend. Similarly, that other antediluvian form of capital, the money-lender, is able to act as intermediary, banking the surplus money of one landlord and lending it to others.
When the age of exploration begins, in the 15th century, this process is given a massive boost. Merchant explorers like Columbus are commissioned by European princes to find new territories not for the hell of it, but for the same reason that feudalism had always sought out land to expand its dominion over. For the merchant explorer, the incentive was to find new sources of exotic products, or to find shorter faster routes to the known sources and markets in Asia, so that these products could be sold to the princes, and increasingly to the growing and increasingly affluent town populations. The discovery of America was part of an attempt to find a faster route to India and China, which, at the time, was one of the main sources of these exotic textiles, spices and other products.
Colonialism is then a product primarily of feudalism, but also of its relation to these antediluvian forms of capital, of usury and merchant capital, with which it enters into a symbiotic relation. In terms of Paul's concept of transition, it is this symbiotic relation which results not in a crisis or collapse of feudalism, but in it reaching a higher level, a metamorphosing into Mercantilism, a transitional stage between feudalism and capitalism, in which capitalist production rises, and feudal production is dissolved. In many ways, it's like the process that Marx describes in relation to feudal rent itself; money rent is the most mature form of feudal rent, and it is, at the same time, the means by which feudal rent is dissolved and capitalist rent arises in its place.
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