POLITICAL ECONOMY - THE FEUDAL MODE OF PRODUCTION

POLITICAL ECONOMY

CHAPTER III : THE FEUDAL MODE OF PRODUCTION

Rise of Feudalism

The feudal system existed, with particular features of one sort or another, in almost all countries.

The era of feudalism covers a long period. In China the feudal system existed for more than two thousand years. In Western Europe feudalism covers a number of centuries, from the time of the fall of the Roman Empire (fifth century) to the bourgeois revolution in England (seventeenth century) and in France (eighteenth century); in Russia from the ninth century to the peasant reform of 1861; in Transcaucasia from the fourth century to the seventies of the nineteenth century; among the peoples of Central Asia from the seventh or eighth centuries right up to the victory of the proletarian revolution in Russia.

In Western Europe feudalism arose out of the breakdown of Roman slave-owning society, on the one hand, and the decay of the tribal system of the conquering tribes, on the other; it was established as a result of the interaction of these two processes.

Elements of feudalism, as has already been said, had originated in the womb of slave-owning society in the form of the system of coloni. The coloni were obliged to work the land of their master, the large landowner, to make him a definite money payment or hand over a considerable share of the harvest, and to fulfil various types of duty. Nevertheless, the coloni had more interest in their labour than the slaves, since they had their own holdings.

Thus there arose new productive relations which achieved full development in the feudal period.

Tribes of Germans, Gauls, Slavs and other peoples living in different parts of Europe destroyed the Roman Empire. The slave-owners’ power was overthrown and slavery fell. The large latifundia and handicraft workshops based on slave labour broke down. The population of the former Roman Empire consisted of large landowners (former slave-owners, who had adopted the system of coloni), freed slaves, coloni, small peasants and artisans.

The conquering tribes, at the time of the subjugation of Rome, had a communal system which was in decline. The village community, which the Germans called the mark, played a great part in the social life of these tribes.

The land, except for the large landed possessions of the clan nobility, was common property. The forests, heaths, pastures and ponds were used in common. Fields and meadows were re-divided every few years among the members of the community. Gradually, however, the land around the homestead, and later also the ploughland, began to be inherited by separate families. The distribution of land, the investigation of matters concerning the community, the settlement of disputes between its members, were dealt with by the community meeting and by the elders and judges elected by it. At the head of the conquering tribes stood their military leaders who, together with their retinues, held considerable tracts of land.

The tribes which conquered the Roman Empire acquired a great part of its State lands and some part of the lands of the large proprietors. Forests, meadows and pastures remained in common use, but the ploughland was divided into separate holdings. Later the divided lands became the private property of the peasants. Thus a broad stratum of independent small peasantry was formed.

The peasants, however, were unable to preserve their independence for long. Property inequality between different members of the village community inevitably developed on the basis of private ownership of land and ‘other means of production. Well-to-do and poor families appeared among the peasants. With the growth of property inequality members of the community who had grown rich began to acquire power over the community. The land was more and more concentrated in the hands of the rich families, the clan aristocracy and military leaders. The peasants fell into personal dependence on the large landowners.

The conquest of the Roman Empire hastened the break-up of the clan system among the conquering tribes.

In order to maintain and strengthen their power over the dependent peasants the large landowners had to reinforce the organs of State power.

Military leaders, relying on the clan aristocracy and the members of their retinues, began to concentrate power in their hands and became kings-monarchical rulers.

A number of new States headed by kings were formed on the ruins of the Roman Empire. The kings generously handed out the land they had seized for the lifetime and afterwards for the hereditary possession of their attendants, who had to bear military service in return. The Church, which served as an important support for the royal power, received much land. The land was worked by peasants who now had to fulfil a number of duties for their new masters. Huge landholdings passed into the hands of members of the royal retinue and servants, the clerical authorities and the monasteries.

The lands distributed on such conditions were called feods (fiefs). Hence comes the name of the new social structure, feudalism.

The gradual conversion of peasant land into the property of feudal lords and the enserfment of the peasant masses (the process of feudalisation) took place in Europe in the course of a number of centuries (from the fifth or sixth to the ninth or tenth centuries). The free peasantry was ruined by incessant military service, plunder and impositions. Turning for help to the large landowner, the peasants converted themselves into his dependents. Frequently the peasants were compelled to yield themselves into the “protection" of the feudal lord; otherwise it was impossible for a defenceless man to exist in conditions of ceaseless wars and bandit raids. In such cases property rights in the plot of land passed to the feudal lord, and the peasant could work his plot only on condition of fulfilling various duties for the lord. In other cases the royal lieutenants and officials, by means of deceit and force, appropriated the land of free peasants, making the latter acknowledge their power.

In different countries the process of feudalisation took different courses, but the essence of the matter was everywhere the same: the formerly free peasants fell into personal dependence on the feudal lords who had seized their land. Sometimes this dependence’ was weaker, sometimes stronger. In course of time the differences in the position of former slaves, coloni and free peasants disappeared, and they were all converted into a single mass of peasant serfs. Gradually there was established the’ position which is described by the medieval phrase: “No land without its lord." (i.e.) without its feudal master). The kings were the supreme landowners.

Feudalism was an essential stage in the historical development of society.

Slavery had outlived itself. In these circumstances the further development of productive forces was only possible on the basis of the labour of the mass of dependent peasantry, possessing their own holdings, their own implements of production and having some interest in labour.

As the history of mankind testifies, however, it is not obligatory that every people should pass through all stages of social development. For many peoples conditions arise under which they have the possibility of missing one stage of development or another and of passing immediately to a higher stage.

In Russia patriarchal slavery arose when the primitive community was breaking down. The development of society here, however, went in the main not along the road of slave-owning, but of feudalisation. The Slavonic tribes, even when the clan system was predominant among them, beginning from the third century A.D., attacked the Roman slave-owning Empire, struggled to free the towns of the northern Black Sea coast which were in its power and played a great part in the overthrow of the slave-owning system. The transition from the primitive community to feudalism-took place in Russia at a time when the slave-owning system had long since fallen in the countries of Western Europe, and when feudal relations had been stabilised there.

The village community among the Eastern Slavs was called verv or mir. The community had meadows, forests and ponds in common use, but the ploughland began to pass into the possession of separate families. An elder was at the head of the community. The development of private landowning led to the gradual breakdown of the village communities. The elders and tribal princes seized the land. The peasants (smerds) were at first free members of the community, but later fell into dependence on the large landowners (boyars).

The Church became the largest feudal owner. Grants by the princes, endowments and legacies made it the possessor of broad lands and the richest estates of those times. In the period of the formation of the centralised Russian State (fifteenth to sixteenth centuries) t9-e Grand Princes and Tsars began to “place" (Russian, pomeshchat) their attendants and serving people on the land, i.e., to give them land and peasants on condition of their owing military service. Hence the names pomest’e (fee or estate) and pomeshchik (lord of the manor).

At that time the peasants were not yet finally bound to the landowner and the land; they had the right to transfer from one lord to another. At the end of the sixteenth century the lords, with a view to increasing the production of grain for sale, intensified their exploitation of the peasants. In connection with this the State in 1581 deprived the peasants of the right of transfer from one landlord to another. The peasants were completely bound to the land belonging to the lords and were thus converted into serfs.

In the period of feudalism agriculture played a predominant part and tillage was its most important branch. Gradually, in the course of a number of centuries, methods of grain-growing improved and market gardening, fruit-growing, vine-growing and butter-making developed.

In the early period of feudalism the fallow system predominated, but in forested regions the “slash and burn" system of tillage predominated. A plot of land was sown several years consecutively with some crop until the soil was exhausted. Then they transferred to another plot. Later an advance to the “three-field" system took place; in this the arable was divided into three fields of which in turn, one was used for winter crops, the second for spring crops and the third remained fallow. The three-field system began to spread in Western Europe between the ninth and the tenth and in Russia from the eleventh and twelfth centuries onwards: It remained dominant throughout many centuries, being preserved until the nineteenth century and, in many countries, even to the present time.

Agricultural equipment in the early period of feudalism was poor. The primitive wooden plough (sokha) with iron share, the sickle, scythe and spade served as implements of labour. Later, the iron plough and harrow began to be used. The grinding of grain was for a long time carried out by hand, until wind and water mills became widespread.

Production Relations of Feudal Society. 

Exploitation of Peasants by Feudal Lords

The property of the feudal lords in land and their incomplete property rights over the peasant serf were the basis of the production relations of feudal society. The peasant serf was not a slave. He had his own holding. The feudal lord could no longer kill him, but he could sell him. By the side of the property of the feudal lords there also existed the individual property of peasants and craftsmen in their implements of production and in their private holdings, based on personal labour.

Large-scale feudal landed property was the basis for the exploitation of peasants by the lords. The feudal lord sown demesne occupied part of the land.

The feudal lord granted another part of the land on extortionate conditions for use by the peasants. The lord allotted land to the peasants to “hold", hence the expression “holding". The peasant holding was the means by which the lord secured his labour force. With hereditary possession of his holding, the peasant was obliged to work for the lord to till the lord’s soil with the help of his own implements and stock, or else to give the lord his surplus product in kind or in money.

Such a system of economy inevitably presupposed the peasants’ personal dependence on the landlord-a system of extra-economic compulsion. “If the lord had not had direct power over the person of the peasant he would not have been able to compel to work for him a man who possessed land and tilled on his own account." (Lenin, “Development of Capitalism in Russia", Works, fourth Russian edition, vol. III, p. 159.).

The peasant serf’s working time was divided into necessary and surplus time. During the necessary time, the peasant created the product necessary for his own existence and the existence of his family. During the surplus time he created the surplus product which was appropriated by the lord. The surplus labour of the peasant who worked on the lord’s demesne, or the surplus product created by the peasant in his own holding and appropriated by the lord, constitute feudal land-rent.

Feudal rent frequently swallowed up not only the peasant’s surplus labour, but also part of his necessary labour. The basis of this rent was feudal ownership of land, linked with the direct domination of the feudal lord over the peasants dependent on him.

Under feudalism there existed three forms of land-rent: labour-rent, rent in kind and money-rent. In all these forms of rent the exploitation of the peasants by the landlords stood out in unconcealed form.

Labour-rent, or “week-work" (barshchina), predominated in the early stages of feudalism’s development. Under the system of week-work the peasant worked for a specified part of the week, three or more days, with his own implements of production (plough, draught animals, etc.) on his master’s estate and the remaining days worked on his own holding. Thus by week-work the necessary and surplus labour of the peasant were clearly distinguished in time and space. The sphere covered by week-work was exceedingly broad. The peasant ploughed, sowed and gathered the harvest, pastured cattle, worked as a carpenter, chopped timber for the lord, and carted agricultural produce and building materials using his own horse.

Under the week-work system the peasant serf was interested in raising the productivity of labour only while working on his own holding. When working on the lord’s land the peasant had no such interest. The feudal lord kept overseers who compelled the peasants to work.

In the course of further development labour-rent was replaced by rent in kind, or quitrent paid in produce. Under this system the peasant was obliged to deliver regularly to the lord a definite quantity of grain, cattle, poultry and other agricultural produce. Most frequently the quitrent was combined with remnants of week-work duties, i.e., with the peasant’s work on the lord’s demesne.

With rent in kind the peasant expended the whole of his labour both necessary and surplus, according to his own discretion. Necessary and surplus labour were no longer divided as clearly as with labour-rent. Here the peasant became relatively more independent. This created a certain stimulus to further raising the productivity of labour.

At a later stage of feudalism, when exchange had become comparatively widespread, money-rent arose, or quitrent in money. Money-rent is characteristic of the period of the breakdown of feudalism and the appearance of capitalist relations. Various forms of feudal-rent often existed simultaneously.

“In all these forms of ground-rent, whether labour-rent, rent in kind, or money-rent (as a mere change of form of rent in kind), the rent-paying party is always supposed to be the actual tiller and possessor of the land, whose unpaid surplus labour passes directly into the hands of the landlord." (Marx, Capital, Kerr edition, vol. III, p. 932.)

Striving to increase their income, the feudal lords imposed every sort of exaction on the peasant. In many cases they had monopolistic possession of mills, smithies and other enterprises. The peasant was compelled to use them for exceedingly high payments in kind or money. Apart from quitrent in kind or money paid to the feudal lord, the peasant had to pay all sorts of imposts to the State, local taxes and, in some countries, a tithe, i.e., a tenth of the harvest to the Church.

Thus the labour of peasant serfs was the basis of the existence of feudal society. Peasants not only grew agricultural produce. They worked in the feudal lord’s estates as craftsmen, erected castles and monasteries and made roads.

Towns were built by the hands of peasant serfs.

The economy of the feudal lords, particularly in the early stages of its development, was basically a natural economy. Each feudal estate, consisting of the lord’s demesne and the villages belonging to him, lived an isolated economic life, rarely engaging in exchange. The requirements of the feudal lord and his family, and the needs of the numerous house hold were at first satisfied by the produce from the seigniorial economy and supplied by the peasants paying quitrent. Fairly large estates had a sufficient quantity of craftsmen, mostly among the household serfs. These craftsmen made clothing and footwear, made and repaired weapons, hunting equipment and agricultural implements, and erected buildings.

The peasant economy was also a natural one. The peasants engaged not only in agricultural labour but also in domestic handicraft, mainly working up raw materials produced in their holdings-spinning, weaving, making footwear and farm implements.

For a long time a characteristic of feudalism was the combination of agriculture, as the basic branch of the economy, with domestic handicraft, which was auxiliary to it. The few imported products without which it was impossible to manage, as for example, salt and articles of iron, were at first supplied by wandering traders. Later, in connection with the growth of towns and handicraft, the division of labour and development of exchange between town and country made a great step forward.

The exploitation of dependent peasants by feudal lords was the main feature of feudalism among all peoples. However, in particular countries the feudal system had its own special features. In countries of the East feudal relations were for a long time combined with slave relations. Thus it was in China, India, Japan and a number of other countries. Feudal State property in land was of great significance in the East. For example, in the period of the Bagdad Khalifate, under the dominance of the Arabs (particularly in the eighth to ninth centuries A.D.), a large section of the members of peasant communities lived on the Khalif’s land and paid feudal-rent direct to the State. Feudalism in the East was also characterised by the vitality of patriarchal clan relations which were utilised by the feudal lords as a means of intensifying exploitation of the peasants.

In the agricultural lands of the East, where irrigated agriculture is of decisive significance, the peasants were in bondage to the feudal lords because not only the land but also the water resources and irrigation works were the property of the feudal State or of individual feudal lords. Among nomad peoples the land was used as pasture. The size of feudal land-owning was determined by the quantity of cattle. The large cattle-owning feudalists were, in fact, large-scale owners of pasture. They held the peasantry in dependence and exploited them.

The basic economic law of feudalism consisted in the production of surplus product to satisfy the demands of the feudal lords, by means of the exploitation of dependent peasants on the basis of the ownership of the land by the feudal lords and their incomplete ownership of the workers in production-the serfs.

The Medieval Town. Craft Guilds. Merchant Guilds

Towns had already arisen under the slave-owning system. Such towns as Rome, Florence, Venice and Genoa in Italy; Constantinople and Alexandria in the Near East; Paris, Lyons and Marseilles in France; London in England; Samarkand in Central Asia, and many others, were inherited by the Middle Ages from the epoch of slavery. The slave-owning system fell, but towns remained. The large slave-owning workshops broke down, but the crafts continued to exist.

In the period of the early Middle Ages the towns and crafts developed slowly.

Town craftsmen produced articles for sale, but a large part of the objects of consumption which they needed they obtained from their own holdings. Many of them had small ploughlands, gardens and cattle. The women engaged in the spinning of flax and wool to make clothing. This showed the limited extent of markets and exchange.

In the, countryside the working up of agricultural raw material was at first a subsidiary occupation of the husbandman. Then, from among the peasants there began to emerge craftsmen who served their own village. The craftsmen’s productivity of labour increased. It became possible to produce more articles than were necessary for the feudal lord or the peasants of one village. The craftsmen began to settle around feudal castles, at the walls of monasteries, in large villages and other trading centres. Thus, gradually, usually on the waterways, new towns arose (in Russia, for example, Kiev, Pskov, Novgorod, Vladimir). In the course of time crafts became a more and more profitable business. The skill of the craftsman was perfected. The feudal lord began to buy the product of handicraft from the townsmen. He was no longer satisfied with the work of his own serfs. The more developed crafts were finally isolated from agriculture.

The towns which had arisen on the lands of lay and clerical feudal lords were subject to their authority. Townsmen owed a number of duties to the feudal lord, paid him quitrent in kind or money, and were subject to his administration and court. The town population very soon began the struggle for freedom from feudal dependence. Partly by force, partly by means of purchase, the towns obtained for themselves the right of self-administration, holding courts, minting coinage and collecting taxes.

The town population consisted mainly of craftsmen and traders. In many towns serfs fleeing from their landlords found refuge. The town acted as the centre of commodity production, as distinct from the countryside where natural economy prevailed. The growth of competition from the fugitive serfs who had crowded into the towns, the struggle against exploitation and oppression by the feudal lords, caused the craftsmen to unite into guilds. The guild system existed in the feudal period in almost all countries.

Guilds arose in Byzantium and Italy in the ninth and tenth centuries, and later in the whole of “Western Europe and Russia. In the countries of the East (Egypt, China), and in the towns of the Arab Khalifate guilds arose even earlier than in the European countries. The guilds united the town craftsmen of one specific trade or several similar ones. Only the master craftsmen were full members of the guilds. The master craftsmen had a small number of journeymen and apprentices. The guilds carefully preserved the exclusive right of their members to engage in that craft and regulated the process of production: they laid down the length of the working day, the number of journeymen and apprentices with each master defined the quality of raw materials and finished products and their prices, and frequently purchased raw material in common. Methods of work established by long tradition were obligatory for all. Strict regulation had as its aim the prevention of any single master from raising himself above the others. Apart from this the guilds served as mutual aid organisations.

The guilds were a feudal form of craft organisation. In the first period of their existence they played a certain positive part in assisting the strengthening and development of urban crafts. However, with the growth of commodity production and the expansion of the market, the guilds gradually became a brake on the development of productive forces.

The strict regulation of craft production by the guilds fettered the craftsmen’s initiative and hindered the development of technique. In order to limit competition the guilds began to create all sorts of hindrances to those wishing to receive the rights of a master. For the apprentices and journeymen, whose numbers had considerably increased, the possibility of becoming independent masters had practically ceased. They were compelled to remain for their whole life in the position of hired wage workers. In, these conditions the relations between a master and his subordinates lost their former more or less patriarchal character. The masters intensified the exploitation of their subordinates, making them work fourteen to sixteen hours a day for insignificant pay. The journeymen began to unite into secret brotherhoods to defend their interests. The guilds and town authorities persecuted the journeymen’s brotherhoods in every way.

The richest section of the town population were the merchants. Trading activity developed both in the towns surviving from the period of slavery and in the towns which arose under feudalism. The organisation of guilds in the crafts found their counterpart in the organisation of guilds in trade. Merchant guilds in the feudal period existed almost everywhere. In the East they are known from the ninth century, in Western Europe from the ninth or tenth century, and in Russia from the twelfth century. The basic task of the merchant guilds was the struggle with competition from outside merchants, the regulation of weights and measures, the defence of merchants’ rights from the infringements of the feudal lords.

In the ninth to tenth centuries there already existed considerable trade between the countries of the East and Western Europe. Kievan Rus [1] took an active part in this trade. The Crusades (eleventh to thirteenth centuries) played a great part in the expansion of trade, opening the Near Eastern markets for Western European merchants. A flood of gold and silver from the East swept into Europe. Money began to appear in places where it had formerly not been used. The Italian towns, particularly Genoa and Venice, which carried the crusaders to the East in their trading vessels and supplied them with provisions, took a direct part in the conquest of Eastern markets.

For a long time the Mediterranean ports were the main centres of the trade linking Western Europe with the East. But apart from this, trade developed widely in the north German and Netherland towns scattered along the trade routes of the North and Baltic Seas. Here in the fourteenth century there arose a commercial union of towns, the German Hansa, which united in the following two centuries about eighty towns of various European countries. The Hanseatic League carried on trade with England, Scandinavia, Poland and Russia. In exchange for the growth of towns and development of trade greatly influenced the feudal countryside. The economy of the feudal lords began to be drawn into the market. In order to purchase luxury objects and articles of town crafts the feudal lords needed money. In connection with this it was convenient for the feudal lords to transfer. the peasants from week-work and quitrent in kind to money quitrent. Feudal exploitation was still further intensified with the transfer to money quitrents. The contradiction between town and country which had arisen under slavery became still more acute.

Classes and Estates of Feudal Society.

The Feudal Hierarchy Feudal society was divided into two basic classes, feudal lords and peasants.

“Feudal society represented a division of classes under which the vast majority-the peasant serfs-were completely subjected to an insignificant minority-the landlords, who owned the land." (Lenin, “The State", Selected Works, English edition, vol. XI, p. 651.

The class of feudal lords was not a uniform whole. Petty feudal lords paid tribute to those more powerful, helped them in war, but on the other hand took advantage of their patronage. The patron was called the baron or seigneur, and the one patronised the vassal (vavassar). The barons (seigneurs), in their turn, were vassals of still greater barons or lords (tenantsin-chief). Thus the feudal hierarchy was formed.

As the ruling class, the feudal lords stood at the head of the State. They formed one estate, the baronage (nobility, lords). The lords held the honourable position of first estate and had wide political and economic privileges.

The clergy (Church and monastic) was also a very large landowner. It held extensive lands with a numerous dependent and serf population and was the ruling estate together with the nobles.

The broad base of the “feudal ladder" was the peasantry. The peasants were subordinate to the landowner and were under the supreme power of the most powerful feudal lord, the king. The peasantry was an estate without political rights. The landlords were able to sell their serfs and made wide use of this right. The serf-owners subjected the peasants to physical punishment. Lenin called serfdom “serf slavery". The exploitation of peasant serfs was almost as cruel as the exploitation of slaves in the ancient world. Nevertheless, the serf could work part of the time on his own holding and could, to a certain degree, be independent.

The contradiction between feudal lords and peasant serfs was the basic class contradiction of feudal society. The struggle of the exploited peasantry against the feudal lords was carried on throughout the whole period of feudalism and assumed particular intensity at the end of this period, when serf exploitation had been intensified to extremes.

In the towns freed from feudal dependence power was in the hands of the rich townsmen-merchants, usurers, owners of town lands and large house-owners. The artisans of the various crafts who formed the main mass of the town population, often stood out against the town nobility, winning their participation in the town administration together with the town aristocracy. The small craftsmen and journeymen struggled against the master craftsmen and merchants who were exploiting them.

By the end of the feudal period the town population was already considerably stratified. On the one hand, there were rich merchants and master craftsmen, on the other a broad mass of journeymen and apprentices, the town poor. The lower classes of the towns entered into the struggle against the united forces of the town nobility and feudal lords. This struggle fused into a single stream with the struggle of the peasant serfs against feudal exploitation.

The kings (in Russia the Grand Princes and later the Tsars) were considered the holders of supreme power. Beyond the boundaries of their own holdings, however, the significance of the kings’ power in the period of early feudalism was insignificant. Frequently this power remained nominal. The whole of Europe was divided into a multitude of large and small States. The large feudatories were complete masters of their own possessions. They issued laws, saw to their. execution, held courts of justice, inflicted penalties, maintained their own forces, raided their neighbours and did not always refrain from highway robbery. Many of them independently minted coinage. The smaller feudal lords also had exceedingly wide rights in respect of the people under their power; they tried to vie with the great lords.

In the course of time feudal relations created an exceedingly confused tangle of rights and obligations. Endless disputes and quarrels arose between the feudal lords. They were usually decided by force of arms in internecine wars.

Development of the Productive Forces of Feudal Society

In the feudal period a higher level of productive forces was achieved compared with the period of slavery.

In the sphere of agriculture the technique of production was improved; the iron plough and other iron implements of labour were used more extensively.

New branches of cultivation arose; vine-growing, wine-making and market gardening developed considerably. Livestock husbandry grew and particularly horse-breeding, which was linked with the feudal lords’ military service; butter- making developed. Sheep-breeding became widespread in a number of regions. Meadows and pastures were extended and improved.

Gradually, the implements of labour of the craftsmen and methods of processing raw material were improved. Former crafts began to become specialised. Thus, for example, the blacksmith had formerly produced all metal articles. In the course of time the crafts of the armourer, nail-maker, cutler and locksmith separated from the trade of blacksmith, and the craft of the shoemaker and the saddlemaker were separated from the craft of the leather worker. In the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries in Europe the spinning wheel became wide-spread. In 1600 the ribbon loom was invented.

The improvement of the smelting and working of iron was of decisive significance in perfecting the implements of labour. At first iron was produced by an exceedingly primitive method. In the fourteenth century the water-wheel was first used to work bellows for the blast, and heavy hammers to crush the ore. With the increased draught in the furnaces, instead of a malleable mass, a molten mass, cast iron, was obtained. With the application of gunpowder in warfare and the appearance of firearms (in the fourteenth century) much metal was required for cannon balls; from the beginning of the fifteenth century they began to be cast from pig-iron. More and more metal was needed for the production of agricultural and other implements. In the first half of the fifteenth century the first blast furnaces appeared. The invention of the compass helped the further development of navigation and seafaring. The invention and spread of printing was of great significance.

China had achieved a considerable development of its productive forces and culture by the sixth to eleventh centuries, in many respects surpassing the Europe of that time. The Chinese were the first to invent the compass, gunpowder, writing-paper and a very simple form of printing.

The development of the productive forces of feudal society more and more clashed with the narrow framework of feudal production relations. The peasantry, under the yoke of feudal exploitation, were in no condition to increase further the output of agricultural produce. The productivity of unfree peasant labour was exceedingly low. In the town the growth of the craftsman’s productivity of labour came up against the obstacles created by guild statutes and rules. The feudal system was characterised by the slow rate of development of production, by routine and by the authority of tradition.

The productive forces which had grown up in the framework of feudal society demanded new relations of production.

The Birth of Capitalist Production in the Womb of the Feudal System.

The Role of Merchant Capital In the feudal period commodity production gradually developed, town handicrafts expanded and peasant economy was more and more drawn into exchange.

Production by small craftsmen and peasants, based on private property and personal labour creating products for exchange, is called simple commodity production.

As has already been said a product made for exchange is a commodity.

Different commodity producers expend on the production of the same commodities an unequal quantity of labour. This depends on the different conditions in which they have to work: commodity producers possessing improved implements expend on the production of one and the same commodity less labour in comparison with other commodity producers. In addition to differences in the implements of labour, differences in strength, dexterity, the skill of the worker and so on have their effect. The market, however, is not concerned in what conditions and with what implements one commodity or another is produced. For identical commodities on the market one and the same amount of money is paid independent of those individual conditions of labour in which they were produced.

Therefore, commodity producers whose individual labour expenditure, because of worse conditions of production, are higher than average cover only part of these costs when selling their commodities and ultimately are ruined.

On the other hand, commodity producers whose individual labour expenditure thanks to better conditions of production are lower than average, are in an advantageous position when selling their commodities, and grow rich. This strengthens competition. A differentiation takes place among small commodity producers. The majority of them become more and more impoverished, an insignificant section grow rich.

The divided condition of the country under feudalism was a great hindrance in the way of the development of commodity production. The feudal lords established at will dues on imported goods, exacted tribute for passage through their possessions, and thus created serious obstacles to the development of trade. The requirements of trade and the economic development of society in general evoked the necessity of abolishing feudal separatism. The growth of handicraft and agricultural production, the development of the social division of labour between town and country, led to the intensification of economic links between different districts within the country and to the formation of a national market. The formation of a national market created the economic preconditions for the centralisation of State power. The nascent town bourgeoisie was concerned to remove feudal obstacles and supported the creation of a centralised State.

The kings, relying on the broader stratum of non-noble landowners (gentry), on the “vassals of their vassals" and also on the rising towns, dealt the feudal nobility decisive blows and strengthened their own dominance. They became not only nominal, but also effective sovereigns in the State. Large national States emerged in the form of absolute monarchies. The overcoming of feudal separatism and the creation of centralised State power facilitated the appearance and development of capitalist relations.

The formation of a world market was also of great significance for the rise of the capitalist order.

In the second half of the fifteenth century the Turks seized Constantinople and the whole of the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea. The most important artery along which passed the trade routes between Western Europe and the East was cut. In the search for the sea route to India, Columbus discovered America in 1492; while in 1498 Vasco da Gama, having sailed round Africa, discovered the sea route to India.

As a result of these discoveries the focal point of European trade moved from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, the bulk of trade, passed to the Netherlands, England and France. Russia played a noticeable role in European trade.

With the rise of world trade and a world market handicrafts were no longer in a position to satisfy the growing demand for goods. This hastened the transition from small-scale artisan production to large-scale capitalist production, based on the exploitation of wage-workers.

The advance from the feudal mode of production to the capitalist was made in two ways: on the one hand; the differentiation among the small commodity producers gave birth to capitalist entrepreneurs; on the other hand, merchant capital, through the merchants, directly subordinated production to itself.

The guilds were able to limit competition and differentiation among the craftsmen so long as commodity production was little developed. With the development of exchange, competition became stronger and stronger. The masters working for a wider market in part obtained the alteration of guild restrictions, and in part simply evaded them. They lengthened the working day of the journeymen and apprentices, increased their number and applied more productive methods of labour. The richest master craftsmen gradually became capitalists, while the poorer masters, apprentices and journeymen became wage-workers.

Merchant capital assisted the rise of capitalist production by breaking down the natural economy. Merchant capital first appeared as an intermediary in the exchange of the commodities of the small producers-the craftsmen and the peasants-and in the realisation by the feudal lords of part of the surplus product which they appropriated. Later, the merchant began to buy up regularly from the small producers the commodities they had made and then to resell them on a wider market. The merchant became an engrosser. With the growth of competition and the appearance of the engrosser the position of the mass of the craftsmen radically changed. The impoverished masters were compelled to turn for help to the trader or engrosser, who loaned them money and raw materials on condition that they should sell him the finished articles at a pre-arranged low price. Thus, the small producers fell into economic dependence on merchant capital.

Gradually many impoverished masters found themselves dependent in this way on the rich engrosser. He distributed raw material to them-for example, thread to be worked up into cloth for a definite payment-and thus became a putter-out.

The impoverishment of the craftsman resulted in the engrosser now supplying him not only with raw materials, but also with implements of labour.

Thus the craftsman was deprived of the last semblance of independent existence, and was finally converted into a wage-worker, while the engrosser was becoming an industrial capitalist.

The craftsmen of yesterday, gathered in the capitalist’s workshop, carried out uniform work. Soon, however, it was discovered that certain of them were more successful with one operation, others with another. Therefore it was more advantageous to entrust to each one just that part of the work at which he was most skilful. Thus, in the workshops with a fairly considerable number of workers division of labour was gradually introduced.

Capitalist enterprises using wage-workers who worked by hand on the basis of division of labour were called manufactories. [2]

The first manufactories already appeared in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Florence and some medieval city republics of Italy. Then, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, manufactories in various branches of production-cloth, linen, silk, watchmaking, arms and glass-spread in all European countries.

In Russia manufactories began to arise in the seventeenth century. At the beginning of the eighteenth century under Peter I they began to develop at faster rates. Among them were arms, cloth, silk and other manufactories. Iron foundries, mines and salt works were created in the Urals.

As distinct from the West European factories, which were based on wage labour, Russian enterprises in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, while employing some free wage labour, in the main employed the labour of peasant serfs and bound workers. Manufactories based on free wage labour began to become widespread from the end of the eighteenth century. This process was particularly intensified in the last decades before the abolition of serfdom.

The process of the breakdown of feudal relations was also taking place in the countryside. With the development of commodity production the power of money grew. The feudal serf-owners. substituted money payments for the peasants’ payments in kind. The peasants had to sell the products of their labour and pay the feudal lords the money they had obtained. Chronic need of money appeared among the peasants. Engrossers and usurers made use of this to make the peasants their bondmen. Feudal oppression intensified and the position of the serfs deteriorated.

The development of money relations gave a great impetus to the differentiation of the peasantry, i.e., its stratification into different social groups. The overwhelming majority of the peasantry became impoverished, stifled from overwork and were ruined. Side by side with this kulak land-grabbers began to appear m the countryside, exploiting their fellow-villagers by means of loans at extortionate rates and buying up from them agricultural produce, cattle and farm equipment at ruinous prices.

Thus, capitalist production came into existence in the womb of the feudal system.

Primitive Capital Accumulation. 

Forcible Seizure of Peasant Lands

Capitalist production presupposes two basic conditions: one, the presence of numbers of propertyless people, personally free and at the same time deprived of the means of production and livelihood and, therefore, compelled to hire themselves out for work to the capitalists; and two, the accumulation of the wealth in money necessary to create large capitalist enterprises.

We have seen that capitalism drew its sustenance from small commodity production based on private property, with its competition bringing enrichment to the few and ruin to the majority of small producers. The slowness of this process, however, did not correspond to the requirement of the new world market created by the great discoveries of the end of the fifteenth century. The rise of the capitalist mode of production was hastened by the application of the crudest methods of violence by the large landowners, bourgeoisie and the State power which was in the hands of the exploiting classes. Force, in Marx’s expression, played the part of the midwife, hastening the birth of the new capitalist mode of production.

Some bourgeois historians idyllically depict the history of the rise of the capitalist and working classes. In immemorial times, they assert, there existed a group of assiduous and careful men who accumulated wealth by their labour.

On the other hand, there existed a number of lazy-bones and idlers who squandered all their substance and were converted into propertyless proletarians.

These fables of the defenders of capitalism have no connection with reality.

In fact, the formation of the mass of propertyless people, the proletariat, and the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few took place by means of the forcible deprivation of the small producers of their means of production. The process of the separation of the producers from the means of production (the land, implements of production, and so on) was accompanied by an endless succession of acts of plunder and cruelty. This process is called primitive capital accumulation since it preceded the creation of large-scale capitalist production.

Capitalist production achieved considerable development first of all in England. From the end of the fifteenth century there took place in that country an agonising process of the forcible expulsion of the peasants from the land.

The increased demand for wool from the large cloth manufactories, which arose first in Flanders and then in England itself, gave the direct impetus to this. The landlords began to raise large flocks of sheep. Pastures were needed for sheep-raising. The feudal lords drove off the peasants in masses from the places they occupied, seized the lands which had been in their permanent possession, and converted the arable into pastures.

The expulsion of the peasants from the land was carried out by various means, and primarily by means of the open seizure of common lands. The landlords enclosed these lands, destroyed the peasant homes and forcibly expelled the peasants. If the peasants attempted to get back the land illegally seized from them, the armed force of the State came to the help of the landlord. The State power began to issue laws in the eighteenth century on “enclosure", justifying the plundering of the peasants.

The ruined and plundered peasants formed innumerable crowds of indigent beggars who filled the towns, villages and roads of England. Having no means of existence they became beggars. The State authority issued bloody laws against those who had been expropriated. These laws were distinguished by their exceptional ferocity. Thus, in the reign of the English king Henry VIII (sixteenth century), 72,000 people were executed for “vagabondage".

In Tsarist Russia, which entered the road of capitalist development later than other European countries, the separation of the producer from the means of production was effected in the same ways as in other countries. In 1861 the Tsarist government, under the influence of peasant risings was compelled to abolish serfdom.

This reform was a gigantic plundering of the peasants. The landlords seized two-thirds of the land, leaving only one-third for the use of the peasants. The most convenient lands, and also in a number of cases the pastures, ponds, roads to the fields and so on which were used by the peasant, were cut off by the landlords. In the hands of the landlords the lands “cut off" by the landlords became a means of imposing a new bondage on the peasants, compelled to rent these lands from the landlords on the most burdensome conditions. The law while announcing the personal freedom of the peasants, temporarily preserved week-work and quitrent. For the reduced plot of land which he received, the peasant was obliged to carry out these duties for the landlord until the land had been paid for. The scale of purchase payments was reckoned at inflated prices for land and amounted to about two milliard roubles.

Characterising the features of the peasant reform of 1861 Lenin wrote:

“They all represent the first acts of mass violence against the peasantry in the interests of nascent capitalism in agriculture. It is the ‘clearing of estates’ for capitalism by the landlords." (Lenin, “The Agrarian Programme of Social Democracy in the First Russian Revolution", Selected Works, English edition, vol. III, p. 182.),,

A double result was achieved by the eviction of the peasants from the land. On the one hand, the land became the private property of a comparatively small group of landowners.

Feudal estate property in land was converted into bourgeois property. On the other hand, an abundant influx into industry of free workers ready to hire themselves to the capitalists, was assured.

Apart from the presence of a cheap labour force, the accumulation in a few hands of great wealth, in the form of sums of money which could be converted into any means of production and used to hire workers, was essential for the appearance of capitalist production.

In the Middle Ages large amounts of money were accumulated by traders and usurers. This wealth was later used as the basis for organising many capitalist enterprises.

The conquest of America, which was accompanied by the mass plundering and extermination of the native population, brought the conquerors incalculable riches which began to grow still faster as a result of the exploitation of very rich mines of gold and silver. Hands were needed for the mines. The native population, the Indians, perished in masses, not surviving the harsh labour conditions. European merchants in Africa organised the hunting of negroes which was carried out entirely as though it was wild animals they hunted. The trade in negroes exported from Africa and converted into slaves was exceptionally profitable. The slave traders’ profits achieved fabulous heights. Negro slave labour began to be widely applied in the cotton plantations of America.

Colonial trade was also one of the most important sources for the creation of large fortunes. Dutch, English and French merchants organised East India companies for trade with India. These companies were supported by their governments. They were granted the monopoly of trade in colonial commodities and the right of unlimited exploitation of the colonies with the use of any forcible measures they pleased. The profits of the East India companies were reckoned in hundreds per cent per year. In Russia rapacious trading with the population of Siberia gave the merchants huge profits, as did the plunderous system of liquor monopolies, which consisted in the State’s granting to private entrepreneurs the right to produce and sell alcoholic liquors for a definite payment.

Huge wealth in money was concentrated in the hands of commercial and usurers’ capital as a result.

Thus, at the price of the plundering and ruin of the mass of small producers, the wealth essential for the creation of large capitalist enterprises ‘was accumulated. Describing this process, Marx wrote: “... capital comes [into the world] dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." (Marx, Capital, Kerr edition, vol. I, p. 834.)

The Birth of Capitalist Production in the Womb of the Feudal System.

The Role of Merchant Capital In the feudal period commodity production gradually developed, town handicrafts expanded and peasant economy was more and more drawn into exchange.

Production by small craftsmen and peasants, based on private property and personal labour creating products for exchange, is called simple commodity production.

As has already been said a product made for exchange is a commodity.

Different commodity producers expend on the production of the same commodities an unequal quantity of labour. This depends on the different conditions in which they have to work: commodity producers possessing improved implements expend on the production of one and the same commodity less labour in comparison with other commodity producers. In addition to differences in the implements of labour, differences in strength, dexterity, the skill of the worker and so on have their effect. The market, however, is not concerned in what conditions and with what implements one commodity or another is produced. For identical commodities on the market one and the same amount of money is paid independent of those individual conditions of labour in which they were produced.

Therefore, commodity producers whose individual labour expenditure, because of worse conditions of production, are higher than average cover only part of these costs when selling their commodities and ultimately are ruined.

On the other hand, commodity producers whose individual labour expenditure thanks to better conditions of production are lower than average, are in an advantageous position when selling their commodities, and grow rich. This strengthens competition. A differentiation takes place among small commodity producers. The majority of them become more and more impoverished, an insignificant section grow rich.

The divided condition of the country under feudalism was a great hindrance in the way of the development of commodity production. The feudal lords established at will dues on imported goods, exacted tribute for passage through their possessions, and thus created serious obstacles to the development of trade. The requirements of trade and the economic development of society in general evoked the necessity of abolishing feudal separatism. The growth of handicraft and agricultural production, the development of the social division of labour between town and country, led to the intensification of economic links between different districts within the country and to the formation of a national market. The formation of a national market created the economic preconditions for the centralisation of State power. The nascent town bourgeoisie was concerned to remove feudal obstacles and supported the creation of a centralised State.

The kings, relying on the broader stratum of non-noble landowners (gentry), on the “vassals of their vassals" and also on the rising towns, dealt the feudal nobility decisive blows and strengthened their own dominance. They became not only nominal, but also effective sovereigns in the State. Large national States emerged in the form of absolute monarchies. The overcoming of feudal separatism and the creation of centralised State power facilitated the appearance and development of capitalist relations.

The formation of a world market was also of great significance for the rise of the capitalist order.

In the second half of the fifteenth century the Turks seized Constantinople and the whole of the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea. The most important artery along which passed the trade routes between Western Europe and the East was cut. In the search for the sea route to India, Columbus discovered America in 1492; while in 1498 Vasco da Gama, having sailed round Africa, discovered the sea route to India.

As a result of these discoveries the focal point of European trade moved from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, the bulk of trade, passed to the Netherlands, England and France. Russia played a noticeable role in European trade.

With the rise of world trade and a world market handicrafts were no longer in a position to satisfy the growing demand for goods. This hastened the transition from small-scale artisan production to large-scale capitalist production, based on the exploitation of wage-workers.

The advance from the feudal mode of production to the capitalist was made in two ways: on the one hand; the differentiation among the small commodity producers gave birth to capitalist entrepreneurs; on the other hand, merchant capital, through the merchants, directly subordinated production to itself.

The guilds were able to limit competition and differentiation among the craftsmen so long as commodity production was little developed. With the development of exchange, competition became stronger and stronger. The masters working for a wider market in part obtained the alteration of guild restrictions, and in part simply evaded them. They lengthened the working day of the journeymen and apprentices, increased their number and applied more productive methods of labour. The richest master craftsmen gradually became capitalists, while the poorer masters, apprentices and journeymen became wage-workers.

Merchant capital assisted the rise of capitalist production by breaking down the natural economy. Merchant capital first appeared as an intermediary in the exchange of the commodities of the small producers-the craftsmen and the peasants-and in the realisation by the feudal lords of part of the surplus product which they appropriated. Later, the merchant began to buy up regularly from the small producers the commodities they had made and then to resell them on a wider market. The merchant became an engrosser. With the growth of competition and the appearance of the engrosser the position of the mass of the craftsmen radically changed. The impoverished masters were compelled to turn for help to the trader or engrosser, who loaned them money and raw materials on condition that they should sell him the finished articles at a pre-arranged low price. Thus, the small producers fell into economic dependence on merchant capital.

Gradually many impoverished masters found themselves dependent in this way on the rich engrosser. He distributed raw material to them-for example, thread to be worked up into cloth for a definite payment-and thus became a putter-out.

The impoverishment of the craftsman resulted in the engrosser now supplying him not only with raw materials, but also with implements of labour.

Thus the craftsman was deprived of the last semblance of independent existence, and was finally converted into a wage-worker, while the engrosser was becoming an industrial capitalist.

The craftsmen of yesterday, gathered in the capitalist’s workshop, carried out uniform work. Soon, however, it was discovered that certain of them were more successful with one operation, others with another. Therefore it was more advantageous to entrust to each one just that part of the work at which he was most skilful. Thus, in the workshops with a fairly considerable number of workers division of labour was gradually introduced.

Capitalist enterprises using wage-workers who worked by hand on the basis of division of labour were called manufactories. [3] The first manufactories already appeared in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Florence and some medieval city republics of Italy. Then, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, manufactories in various branches of production-cloth, linen, silk, watchmaking, arms and glass-spread in all European countries.

In Russia manufactories began to arise in the seventeenth century. At the beginning of the eighteenth century under Peter I they began to develop at faster rates. Among them were arms, cloth, silk and other manufactories. Iron foundries, mines and salt works were created in the Urals.

As distinct from the West European factories, which were based on wage labour, Russian enterprises in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, while employing some free wage labour, in the main employed the labour of peasant serfs and bound workers. Manufactories based on free wage labour began to become widespread from the end of the eighteenth century. This process was particularly intensified in the last decades before the abolition of serfdom.

The process of the breakdown of feudal relations was also taking place in the countryside. With the development of commodity production the power of money grew. The feudal serf-owners. substituted money payments for the peasants’ payments in kind. The peasants had to sell the products of their labour and pay the feudal lords the money they had obtained. Chronic need of money appeared among the peasants. Engrossers and usurers made use of this to make the peasants their bondmen. Feudal oppression intensified and the position of the serfs deteriorated.

The development of money relations gave a great impetus to the differentiation of the peasantry, i.e., its stratification into different social groups. The overwhelming majority of the peasantry became impoverished, stifled from overwork and were ruined. Side by side with this kulak land-grabbers began to appear m the countryside, exploiting their fellow-villagers by means of loans at extortionate rates and buying up from them agricultural produce, cattle and farm equipment at ruinous prices.

Thus, capitalist production came into existence in the womb of the feudal system.

Primitive Capital Accumulation. Forcible Seizure of Peasant Lands

Capitalist production presupposes two basic conditions: one, the presence of numbers of propertyless people, personally free and at the same time deprived of the means of production and livelihood and, therefore, compelled to hire themselves out for work to the capitalists; and two, the accumulation of the wealth in money necessary to create large capitalist enterprises.

We have seen that capitalism drew its sustenance from small commodity production based on private property, with its competition bringing enrichment to the few and ruin to the majority of small producers. The slowness of this process, however, did not correspond to the requirement of the new world market created by the great discoveries of the end of the fifteenth century. The rise of the capitalist mode of production was hastened by the application of the crudest methods of violence by the large landowners, bourgeoisie and the State power which was in the hands of the exploiting classes. Force, in Marx’s expression, played the part of the midwife, hastening the birth of the new capitalist mode of production.

Some bourgeois historians idyllically depict the history of the rise of the capitalist and working classes. In immemorial times, they assert, there existed a group of assiduous and careful men who accumulated wealth by their labour.

On the other hand, there existed a number of lazy-bones and idlers who squandered all their substance and were converted into propertyless proletarians.

These fables of the defenders of capitalism have no connection with reality.

In fact, the formation of the mass of propertyless people, the proletariat, and the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few took place by means of the forcible deprivation of the small producers of their means of production. The process of the separation of the producers from the means of production (the land, implements of production, and so on) was accompanied by an endless succession of acts of plunder and cruelty. This process is called primitive capital accumulation since it preceded the creation of large-scale capitalist production.

Capitalist production achieved considerable development first of all in England. From the end of the fifteenth century there took place in that country an agonising process of the forcible expulsion of the peasants from the land.

The increased demand for wool from the large cloth manufactories, which arose first in Flanders and then in England itself, gave the direct impetus to this. The landlords began to raise large flocks of sheep. Pastures were needed for sheep-raising. The feudal lords drove off the peasants in masses from the places they occupied, seized the lands which had been in their permanent possession, and converted the arable into pastures.

The expulsion of the peasants from the land was carried out by various means, and primarily by means of the open seizure of common lands. The landlords enclosed these lands, destroyed the peasant homes and forcibly expelled the peasants. If the peasants attempted to get back the land illegally seized from them, the armed force of the State came to the help of the landlord. The State power began to issue laws in the eighteenth century on “enclosure", justifying the plundering of the peasants.

The ruined and plundered peasants formed innumerable crowds of indigent beggars who filled the towns, villages and roads of England. Having no means of existence they became beggars. The State authority issued bloody laws against those who had been expropriated. These laws were distinguished by their exceptional ferocity. Thus, in the reign of the English king Henry VIII (sixteenth century), 72,000 people were executed for “vagabondage".

In Tsarist Russia, which entered the road of capitalist development later than other European countries, the separation of the producer from the means of production was effected in the same ways as in other countries. In 1861 the Tsarist government, under the influence of peasant risings was compelled to abolish serfdom.

This reform was a gigantic plundering of the peasants. The landlords seized two-thirds of the land, leaving only one-third for the use of the peasants. The most convenient lands, and also in a number of cases the pastures, ponds, roads to the fields and so on which were used by the peasant, were cut off by the landlords. In the hands of the landlords the lands “cut off" by the landlords became a means of imposing a new bondage on the peasants, compelled to rent these lands from the landlords on the most burdensome conditions. The law while announcing the personal freedom of the peasants, temporarily preserved week-work and quitrent. For the reduced plot of land which he received, the peasant was obliged to carry out these duties for the landlord until the land had been paid for. The scale of purchase payments was reckoned at inflated prices for land and amounted to about two milliard roubles.

Characterising the features of the peasant reform of 1861 Lenin wrote:

“They all represent the first acts of mass violence against the peasantry in the interests of nascent capitalism in agriculture. It is the ‘clearing of estates’ for capitalism by the landlords." (Lenin, “The Agrarian Programme of Social Democracy in the First Russian Revolution", Selected Works, English edition, vol. III, p. 182.),, A double result was achieved by the eviction of the peasants from the land.

On the one hand, the land became the private property of a comparatively small group of landowners.

Feudal estate property in land was converted into bourgeois property. On the other hand, an abundant influx into industry of free workers ready to hire themselves to the capitalists, was assured.

Apart from the presence of a cheap labour force, the accumulation in a few hands of great wealth, in the form of sums of money which could be converted into any means of production and used to hire workers, was essential for the appearance of capitalist production.

In the Middle Ages large amounts of money were accumulated by traders and usurers. This wealth was later used as the basis for organising many capitalist enterprises.

The conquest of America, which was accompanied by the mass plundering and extermination of the native population, brought the conquerors incalculable riches which began to grow still faster as a result of the exploitation of very rich mines of gold and silver. Hands were needed for the mines. The native population, the Indians, perished in masses, not surviving the harsh labour conditions. European merchants in Africa organised the hunting of negroes which was carried out entirely as though it was wild animals they hunted. The trade in negroes exported from Africa and converted into slaves was exceptionally profitable. The slave traders’ profits achieved fabulous heights. Negro slave labour began to be widely applied in the cotton plantations of America.

Colonial trade was also one of the most important sources for the creation of large fortunes. Dutch, English and French merchants organised East India companies for trade with India. These companies were supported by their governments. They were granted the monopoly of trade in colonial commodities and the right of unlimited exploitation of the colonies with the use of any forcible measures they pleased. The profits of the East India companies were reckoned in hundreds per cent per year. In Russia rapacious trading with the population of Siberia gave the merchants huge profits, as did the plunderous system of liquor monopolies, which consisted in the State’s granting to private entrepreneurs the right to produce and sell alcoholic liquors for a definite payment.

Huge wealth in money was concentrated in the hands of commercial and usurers’ capital as a result.

Thus, at the price of the plundering and ruin of the mass of small producers, the wealth essential for the creation of large capitalist enterprises ‘was accumulated. Describing this process, Marx wrote: “... capital comes [into the world] dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." (Marx, Capital, Kerr edition, vol. I, p. 834.)

Peasant Serf Risings. Bourgeois Revolutions. 

Fall of the Feudal System

The struggle of the peasantry against the feudal landowners took place throughout the whole feudal epoch, but it became particularly sharp towards the end of this epoch. In the fourteenth century France was in the grip of a peasant war which has gone down to history as the “Jacquerie". The rising bourgeoisie of the towns at first supported this movement, but left it at the decisive moment.

At the end of the fourteenth century in England a peasant revolt flared up which covered the greater part of the country. Armed peasants headed by Wat Tyler went through the country, sacking landlords’ estates and the monasteries, and entered London. The feudal lords turned to violence and deceit in order to suppress the rising. Tyler was treacherously killed. Believing the promises of the king and the feudal lords the rebels dispersed to their homes. After this, punitive expeditions went about the countryside dealing out savage punishment to the peasants.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century Germany was convulsed by a peasant war supported by the town poor. Thomas Münzer was the leader of the rebels. The peasants demanded the abolition of the licence and violence of the gentry.

In Russia the peasant wars headed by Stepan Razin in the seventeenth century and Emelyan Pugachov in the eighteenth century were on a particularly large scale. The rebellious peasants sought the abolition of serfdom, the transfer to themselves of the landowners’ and government lands and the ending of landlord rule. The intensification of the crisis of the feudal serf-owning system of economy in the 1850’s was expressed in a broad wave of peasant risings on the eve of the 1861 reform.

In China peasant wars and risings on a huge scale took place throughout the centuries. The rising of the T’ai P’ing in the period of the Tsing dynasty (middle of the nineteenth century) embraced the millions of the peasantry. The rebels occupied the ancient capital of China, Nanking. The T’ai P’ing agrarian law proclaimed equality in the use of land and other property. In State organisation the T’ai P’ing linked monarchy and peasant democracy in their own way, which is also characteristic of peasant movements in other countries.

The revolutionary significance of peasant risings was that they shook the foundations of feudalism and in the end led to the abolition of serfdom.

The transition from feudalism to capitalism in the countries of Western Europe took place through bourgeois revolutions. The struggle of the peasants against the landowners was used by the rising bourgeoisie in order to hasten the downfall of the feudal system, to replace serf exploitation by capitalist exploitation and take power into their own hands. The peasants formed the basic mass of those fighting against feudalism in the bourgeois revolutions. So it was in the first bourgeois revolution in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century. So it was in the English revolution of the seventeenth century. So it was in the bourgeois revolution in France at the end of the eighteenth century.

The bourgeoisie used the fruits of the revolutionary struggle of the peasantry, climbing to power on its shoulders. The peasants were strong in their hatred of the oppressors. The peasant risings, however, bore a spontaneous character. The peasantry, as a class of small private owners, was split up and could not create a clear programme or a strong and well-knit organisation for the struggle. Peasant risings can lead to success only if they unite with the workers’ movement and if the workers lead the peasant risings.

At the period of the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, the working class was still weak, few in numbers and unorganised.

In the womb of feudal society more or less complete forms of the capitalist order ripened. The new exploiting class, the capitalist class, grew up and there appeared at the same time masses of people deprived of the means of production, the proletarians.

In the period of bourgeois revolutions the bourgeoisie used against feudalism the economic law of the obligatory correspondence between relations of production and the character of the forces of production; they overthrew feudal production relations, created new, bourgeois production relations and brought production relations into keeping with the character of the forces of production which had ripened in the womb of feudalism.

The bourgeois revolutions put an end to the feudal system and established the dominance of capitalism.

Economic Views of the Feudal Period

The social system dominant at that time was reflected in the economic views of the feudal period. Mental life in feudal society was under the control of the clergy and therefore found expression predominantly in a religious and scholastic form. Considerations on the economic life of that time formed special sections in theological tracts.

Economic opinions in China were for many centuries under the influence of the teaching of Confucius. Confucianism as a religious ideology had arisen already in the fifth century B.C. The social and economic views of Confucianism require strict maintenance of the hierarchy of feudal estates, both in State structure and in family life. In Confucius’s words, “the unenlightened people should obey the aristocrats and wise men. Disobedience by ordinary people to their superiors is the beginning of disorder". At the same time, Confucius called upon the “nobles" to be “humane" and not to treat the poor too harshly. Confucius advocated the necessity of uniting China, which was then divided, under the rule of a monarch. Confucius and his followers idealised backward forms of economy and extolled the “golden age" of the patriarchal past. The peasantry, crushed by the feudal aristocracy and the merchants, put into the Confucian preachings their own aspirations and hopes for betterment of their lot, though Confucianism did not express the class interests of the peasantry. As it developed, Confucianism became transformed into the official ideology of the feudal nobility. It was used by the ruling classes for the purpose of training the people in a spirit of slavish submission to the feudalists and of perpetuating the feudal system.

One of the ideologists of feudalism in medieval Europe, Thomas Aquinas (thirteenth century), attempted to justify the need for feudal society by divine law. Proclaiming feudal property as necessary and reasonable, and declaring the peasant serfs to be slaves, Thomas Aquinas, in opposition to the ancient slave-owners, asserted that “in his soul the slave is free" and therefore a master has no right to kill a slave. Labour was no longer considered unworthy of a free man. Thomas Aquinas regarded physical labour as base, and mental labour as noble.

In this division he saw the justification for society’s division into estates. The same approach from the point of view of the feudal estates appeared in his views on wealth. Each person should own wealth in keeping with the position which he occupied on the hierarchical feudal ladder. From this point of view the teaching of the medieval theologians on .the so-called ‘‘just’’ price is characteristic. The “just" price should reflect the quantity of labour expended in producing a commodity, and the estate of the producer.

Medieval defenders of the ‘‘just’’ price did not protest at all against merchant profits. They only strove to confine profits within bounds so that they would not threaten the economic existence of the other estates. They condemned usury as a low and immoral occupation. With the development of commodity production and exchange, however, the clergy themselves began to take part in money-lending; along with this, the attitude of the Church to usury became more and more tolerant.

The class struggle of the oppressed and exploited masses against the ruling classes of feudal society developed in a religious form for several centuries. The demands of exploited peasants and journeymen were frequently based on quotations from the Bible. All sorts of sects were very widespread. The Catholic church, fiercely persecuting “heretics" through the Inquisition, burned them at the stake.

With the development of the class struggle, the religious form of the movement of the oppressed masses retreated into the background, and the revolutionary character of this movement stood out ever more clearly. The peasants demanded the suppression of serf slavery, the abolition of feudal privileges, the establishment of equal rights, the abolition of estates, and so on.

In the course of the peasant wars in England, Bohemia and Germany the slogans of the rebels became more and more radical. The longing of the exploited masses of town and country for equality expressed itself in the demand for community of property. This was a yearning for equality in the sphere of consumption. Although the demand for community of property was unrealisable, it was of revolutionary significance at that time since it rallied the masses in struggle against feudal oppression.

Towards the end of the feudal period two outstanding early Utopian Socialists appeared-the Englishman Thomas More, who wrote Utopia (sixteenth century) and the Italian Tomaso Campanella whose book is called City of the Sun (seventeenth century). Seeing the growing inequality and contradictions of contemporary society, these thinkers expounded their views on the causes of social evils in an original form; they described what were, in their opinion, ideal social systems, from which these evils would be excluded.

In the books of these Utopians a social system is described which is free from private property and all its accompanying faults. Every one in this society is engaged in both handicraft and agricultural labour. All inhabitants work six, or even four, hours a day, and the fruits of their labour are entirely sufficient to satisfy all their needs. Products are distributed according to need. The education of children is a concern of society.

The works of More and Campanella played a progressive part in the process of the development of social thought. They contained ideas considerably in advance of the development of society of that time. More and Campanella, however, did not know the laws of social development, and their ideas were unrealisable, “Utopian". It was impossible at that time to destroy social inequality; the level of productive forces demanded the advance from feudal to capitalist exploitation.

The rise of capitalism belongs to the sixteenth century. To the same century belong the first attempts to comprehend and explain a number of the phenomena of capitalism. Thus in the.sixteenth to eighteenth centuries there arose and developed the trend of economic thought and policy known as mercantilism.

Mercantilism arose in England, and afterwards it appeared in France, Italy and other countries. The mercantilists discussed the question of the country’s wealth, the forms of wealth and the ways of its growth.

This was a time when capital-in the form. of merchant and usurers’ capital-was predominant in the sphere of trade and credit. In the sphere of production, however, it had made only the first steps by founding manufactories. After the discovery and conquest of America a flood of gold and silver poured into Europe. Gold and silver were then ceaselessly re-distributed among the individual European States, both by means of wars and through foreign trade.

In their understanding of the nature of wealth the mercantilists started from the superficial phenomena of circulation. They concentrated attention not on production, but on trade and money circulation, particularly the movement of gold and silver.

In the view of the mercantilists, not social production and its products, but money, gold and silver, was the sole real wealth. The mercantilists demanded active intervention in economic life by the State, so that as much money as possible should flow into the country and as little as possible pass beyond its limits. The early mercantilists sought to achieve this by purely administrative measures, forbidding the export of money from the country. Later mercantilists considered it essential to expand foreign trade for these ends. Thus an English partisan of mercantilism, Thomas Mun (1571-1641), a great merchant and director of the East India Company wrote: “The ordinary means therefore to increase our wealth and treasure is by Foreign Trade, wherein we must ever observe this rule; to sell more to strangers yearly than we consume of theirs in value." The mercantilists reflected the interests of the bourgeoisie which was growing up in the womb of feudalism and striving to accumulate wealth in gold and silver by developing foreign trade, colonial plunder and trade wars and the enslavement of backward peoples. In connection with the development of capitalism, they began to demand that the State authorities should protect the development of industrial enterprises, the manufactories. Export bounties, which were paid to merchants selling commodities on the foreign market, were established. Import duties soon became still more significant. With the development of the manufactories and later of factories, the imposition of duties on imported commodities became the most widespread defence measure of home industry against foreign competition.

Such a defensive policy is called protectionism. In many countries it remained for a long time after the conceptions of mercantilism had been overcome.

In England protective duties were of great significance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when competition from the more developed manufactories of the Netherlands threatened her. From the eighteenth century England was steadily gaining industrial leadership.

Other less developed countries could not compete with her. Consequently, ideas of free trade began to gain ground in England.

A different situation was created in countries which entered on the capitalist road later than England. Thus, in France in the seventeenth century Colbert, the minister of Louis XIV, who in’ fact ruled the country, created a widely ramified system of State patronage of manufactories.

His system included high import duties, the prohibition of exports of raw materials, the introduction of a number of new branches of industry, the setting up of companies for foreign trade, and so on.

Mercantilism played a progressive part for its time. The protectionist policy inspired by the ideas of mercantilism greatly helped the spread of manufactories. The lack of development of capitalist production at that time, however, was reflected in the mercantilists’ views of wealth. The further development of capitalism made the unsoundness of the conceptions of the mercantile system more and more evident.

In Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the feudal serf-owning system of economy was dominant. The economy was basically a natural one. At the same time, trade and handicraft developed considerably, a national market was formed and manufactories began to arise. These economic changes in the country helped to strengthen absolutism in Russia.

The representatives of Russian economic thought, reflecting the historical and economic peculiarities of the country, developed certain mercantilist ideas. However, as distinct from many West European mercantilists, they ascribed great significance not only to trade, but also to the development of industry and agriculture.

The economic views of that time were reflected in the works and measures of the seventeenth century Russian statesman A.L. Ordyn-Nashchokin, in the economic policy of Peter I and in the works of the most important Russian economist of the beginning of the eighteenth century, 1.T. Pososhkov.

In his Book on Poverty and Wealth (1724) I.T. Pososhkov expounded a broad programme of Russian economic development and offered a developed justification for this programme. Pososhkov demonstrated the necessity of adopting a number of economic measures in Russia with the aim of protecting the development of home industry trade and agriculture and improving the country’s financial system.

In the last third of the eighteenth century a tendency to the breakdown of feudal serf-owning relations was noticeable in Russia; this became much more acute in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and later grew into a direct crisis of serfdom.

The initiator of the revolutionary-democratic trend in Russian social thought, A.N. Radishchev (1749-1802), was an outstanding economist of his time. Radishchev, resolutely attacking serfdom and defending the oppressed peasantry, made an annihilating criticism of the serf-owning system, exposed the exploiting nature of the wealth of the landlords and serf-owners, the owners of manufactories and traders and justified the right to ownership of land of those who worked it with their labour. Radishchev was firmly convinced that the autocracy and serfdom could be liquidated only by revolutionary means. He worked out a system of economic measures which were progressive for, his time, and the realisation of which would have secured Russia s advance to a bourgeois democratic system.

The Decembrists, in the first half of the nineteenth century, were revolutionaries of that historical period in Russia when the need to replace feudalism by capitalism had ripened. They directed the edge of their criticism against serfdom. Standing forth as fiery partisans of the development of Russia’s productive forces, they considered the abolition of serfdom and the emancipation of the peasants as the most important conditions of this development. The Decembrists not only put forward the slogan of struggle against serfdom and autocracy, but also organised an armed rising against the absolute monarchy. P.I. Pestel (1793-1826) worked out an original scheme for the solution of the agrarian problem in Russia. He drew up a kind of draft constitution, which he called “The Russian Law", envisaging the urgent and complete emancipation of the peasants from serfdom and also economic measures for the defence of the peasants’ interests for the future. For this purpose Pestel considered it essential to create a special public land fund from which each peasant could receive for his own use, without payment, land essential for his existence. This fund should be formed out of part of the land of the landlords and the Government, moreover, part of the land should be alienated from the largest landlords without compensation. The Decembrists, as revolutionaries coming from the ranks of the gentry, were far from the people, but their ideas of struggle against serfdom helped the growth of the revolutionary movement in Russia.

The ideology of the bourgeoisie in their rise to supremacy was formed in conditions of the breakdown of feudalism and the birth of the capitalist order of society. This ideology was directed against the feudal system and against religion as the ideological weapon of the feudal lords. Therefore, the outlook of the bourgeoisie struggling for power had a progressive character in a number of countries. Its most notable representatives-economists and, philosophers-subjected to decisive criticism all the fundamental principles of feudal society: economic, political, religious, philosophical and moral. They played a great part in the ideological preparation of the bourgeois revolution and exerted a progressive influence on the development of science and art.

BRIEF CONCLUSIONS

(1) Feudalism arose on the basis of the disintegration of slave-owning society and the break-up of the village community of the tribes which conquered the slave-owning States. In those countries where there had been no slave-owning system, feudalism arose on the basis of the break-up of the primitive community system. The clan aristocracy and military leaders of the tribes took into their hands a great quantity of lands and distributed them among their followers. The gradual enserfing of the peasants took place.

(2) The feudal lord’s ownership of land and incomplete ownership of the worker in production-the peasant serf-was the basis of the relations of production in feudal society. As well as feudal property there existed the individual property of the peasant and craftsman, which was based on personal labour. The labour of the peasant serfs was the source of the existence of feudal society. Serf exploitation was expressed in the fact that the peasants were compelled to perform week-work for the feudal lord, or to pay him quitrent in kind and in money. The burden that serfdom laid on the peasant was frequently little different from that of slavery. However, the serf system opened certain possibilities for the development of the productive forces since the peasant could work a certain part of the time on his own holding and had a certain interest in his labour.

(3) The basic economic law of feudalism consists in the production of surplus product to satisfy the demands of the feudal lords, by means of the exploitation of dependent peasants, on the basis of the ownership of the land by the feudal lords and their incomplete ownership of the workers in production-the serfs.

(4) Feudal society, particularly in the period of the early Middle Ages, was split into small princedoms and states. The nobility and clergy were the ruling estates of feudal society. The peasant estate had no political rights. A class struggle between peasants and feudal lords took place throughout the whole history of feudal society. The feudal State, reflecting the interests of nobility and clergy, was an active force helping them to consolidate their right of feudal ownership of the land and to intensify their exploitation of the dispossessed and oppressed peasants.

(5) In the feudal epoch agriculture played a predominant part, and the economy had a basically natural character. With the development of the social division of labour and exchange, the old towns which had survived the fall of the slave-owning system revived, and new towns arose. The towns were centres of handicraft and trade. The crafts were organised in guilds which strove to prevent competition. Traders united in merchant guilds.

(6) The development of commodity production, breaking down the natural economy, led to differentiation among the peasants and the craftsmen. Merchant capital hastened the decline of the crafts and promoted the birth of capitalist enterprise-the manufactories. Feudal limitations and territorial divisions acted as a brake on the growth of commodity production. In the process of further development the national market was formed. The centralised feudal State arose in the form of absolute monarchy.

(7) Primitive accumulation of capital prepared the conditions for the rise of capitalism. Huge numbers of small producers-peasants and craftsmen-were deprived of the means of production. Great monetary wealth concentrated in the hands of large landowners, merchants and usurers was created by means of the forcible expropriation of the peasantry, colonial trade, taxes and the slave trade. Thus the formation of the basic classes of capitalist society, of wage-workers and capitalists, was accelerated. More or less complete forms of the capitalist order of society grew and ripened in the womb of feudal society.

(8) The production relations of feudalism, the low productivity of the unfree labour of the peasant serfs, and guild restrictions, hindered the further development of productive forces. Peasant serf risings. shook the feudal system and led to the abolition of serfdom. The bourgeoisie took the lead in the struggle for the overthrow of feudalism. It made use of the revolutionary struggle of the peasants against the feudal lords in order to take power into its own hands. The bourgeois revolutions put an end to the feudal system and established the rule of capitalism, giving scope for the development of the forces of production.

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Part II : CAPITALIST MODE OF PRODUCTION
IV. Commodity Production. Commodities and Money