With the fall of the Roman Empire, at the hands of the Goths and Vandals, even the limited egalitarianism it posited for freemen was swept away. In its place came a hierarchical social structure, which forms the basis of feudalism. It brought, “Western and Central Europe into the course of historical development, created a compact cultural area for the first time, and within this area also for the first time a system of predominantly national states influencing each other and mutually holding each other in check. It thus prepared the ground on which alone the question of the equal status of men, of the rights of man, could be raised at a later period.” (p 131)
As Marx noted in The Poverty of Philosophy, feudalism does not metamorphose into capitalism, nor do the serfs, as serfs, metamorphose into bourgeois and proletarians. A serf, as with a slave, can simply be reproduced for ever and a day, their surplus labour appropriated by the slave owner or feudal lord. It is not this relation that provides the dynamic of social development. Rather, it is the rupture of this relation. Once the serfs are freed, and the feudal retainers are disbanded, they are also separated from the means of production and consumption. In order to survive, they must find themselves some other source of income. They move to towns and cities in the Middle Ages, and use whatever skills they have developed from cottage industry to become independent commodity producers. As such, they come into competition with the existing feudal guild production, based on protectionism and guild monopolies. It is this activity of the former serfs, as, now, small scale commodity producers that leads to their development into a new bourgeois class.
“Originally itself a feudal estate, the bourgeoisie had developed the predominantly handicraft industry and the exchange of products within feudal society to a relatively high level, when at the end of the fifteenth century the great maritime discoveries opened up to it a new career of wider scope. Trade beyond the confines of Europe, which had previously been carried on only between Italy and the Levant, was now extended to America and India, and soon surpassed in importance both the mutual exchange between the various European countries and the internal trade within each individual country. American gold and silver flooded Europe and forced its way like a disintegrating element into every gap, fissure, and pore of feudal society. Handicraft industry could no longer satisfy the rising demand, in the leading industries of the most advanced countries it was replaced by manufacture.” (p 131-2)
By manufacture, here, is meant handicraft production, but, now, undertaken by several producers under one roof, as described by Marx in Capital, and by Lenin in The Development of Capitalism in Russia. These manufactories, set up, often, by merchant capitalists, or the larger handicraft producers themselves, already facilitate economies of scale. The size of building required does not increase proportionate to the volume of production, buying materials in larger quantities enables lower prices to be negotiated, savings on marketing are achieved, time required to get materials etc. from a stock room is reduced, but, also, it already enables a level of technical division of labour, and attendant increase in productivity.
That enabled this bourgeois production to undercut the old, feudal, guild production so that it continued to expand, despite the restrictions placed upon it. It does not arise as a metamorphosis of feudal production, but as, from the start, a separate species in competition with it.
“But this mighty revolution in the economic conditions of society was not followed by any immediate corresponding change in its political structure. The state order remained feudal, while society became more and more bourgeois.” (p 132)
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