It is rather what arises in the interstices of this society that produces this new, better adapted social organism, a process of evolution, not metamorphosis, which leads to bourgeois society. In other words, the processes of feudal society, of land ownership and collection of feudal rents, tithes and taxes by the ruling class, out of the social surplus of the peasants is just as self-sustaining, but ultimately sterile, as the processes of the AMP. The individual peasant household is, also, self-sustaining from their own direct production.
There is no dynamic in these social relations that leads to any process of development via its metamorphosis into capitalism. Rather, as Marx describes, it is the gradual dissolution of these relations and the dynamic of those expelled from it that creates the new social forms that are superior to it, and better adapted to the changing material conditions. It is the serfs, the bands of feudal retainers, and so on, who, unlike the self-sustaining peasant households, have no means of production, are driven into the medieval towns and cities.
It is the growth of these towns and cities, already existing as centres of trade and commerce, that creates the conditions for an expansion of commodity production and exchange, which, until then, had been peripheral. These serfs and retainers now become, in these growing towns, the basis of a new growing class of urban, independent commodity producers. It is this which creates the dynamic that leads to the evolution of a new species of social organism, bourgeois society, not any process of metamorphosis of feudal society. Bourgeois society arises in the interstices of feudal society, much as the original, rat-like mammals arose in the interstices, at the time the world was ruled by dinosaurs.
These two different species exist not as a metamorphosis of one into the other, as its inevitable, more mature form, but in opposition to each other, in a struggle for survival and dominance.
As Engels put it,
“The Reform Bill of 1831 had been the victory of the whole capitalist class over the landed aristocracy. The repeal of the Corn Laws was the victory of the manufacturing capitalist not only over the landed aristocracy, but over those sections of capitalists, too, whose interests were more or less bound up with the landed interest - bankers, stockjobbers, fundholders, etc. Free Trade meant the readjustment of the whole home and foreign, commercial and financial policy of England in accordance with the interests of the manufacturing capitalists.”
(Preface To The Second German Edition of “The Condition Of The Working Class”)
The detailed account of how the growth of the towns leads to the development of independent commodity production, and, thereby, the development of capitalist production, in the towns, which, then, spreads into agriculture, is given by Lenin in The Development of Capitalism In Russia, as well as in all the earlier polemics against the Narodniks, such as On The So Called Market Question.
Lenin had the advantage that, with the late development of commodity production and exchange, in Russia, which only occurs after The Emancipation of The Serfs, after 1861, these process, which occurred in the rest of Western Europe 400 years earlier, could now be observed and analysed in real-time. Moreover, what took 400 years to fully mature in Western Europe, into industrial capitalism, was compressed into a timespan of just a few decades, in Russia.
But, as Marx and Engels had determined, and Lenin is able to observe, in Russia, once this process of the development of commodity production and exchange gets underway, in the towns, it inevitably involves the development of a market, and competition. Competition involves winners and losers. The winners become industrial capitalists, and the losers proletarians. Means of production become centralised in the hands of the industrial capitalists, as, now, capital.
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