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Part 2 of Dimmock on Brenner
Brenner argued that for these Marxist historians whose analysis varies
little from Adam Smith, 'the historical origin of capitalism becomes
that of the origins of trade-based division of labor,' along the lines
that Marx laid out in The German Ideology.' Like Smith, their accounts
of the transition from feudalism to capitalism are rooted in the initial
establishment of trade routes. Following Henri Pirenne, 'for Sweezy...it
is the re-establishment of Mediterranean commerce after the Mohammedan
invasions; for Wallerstein (who follows Frank), it is the great voyages
of discovery and conquests which paved the way for the rise of the world
market.' For Brenner there cannot be a straightforward determination of
economic and demographic forces by technical changes or improvements in
production because the application of techniques is dependent upon not
only the desirability and opportunity but 19/ crucially the ability of
lords or peasants to make changes, and not only as individuals and
families but as lordly political communities in fundamental conflict
with peasant political communities. As he says, 'Economic needs or
desires cannot explain their own satisfaction, nor can opportunities
account for the capacity to take advantage of them.'
[...]
20/ ...the relationships among feudal lords and between feudal lords and
feudal monarchies, their social cohesion and processes of political
centralization and state formation, now joined center stage with
struggles between communities of feudal lords and political communities
of peasants. The driving force of history was now explicitly not simply
the vertical class-struggle dialectic between producers and
appropriators, peasants and lords - ...but the closely interconnected
horizontal relations within the main classes. The development of
capitalist social-property relations was no longer simply a question of
the 'break-through' to self-sustaining growth, but rather the problem of
a 'transition' from one specific set of social-property relations to
another.
...Brenner's historical materialist approach...takes seriously Marx's
emphasis in his later critique of political economy on the specificity
of modes of production. Brenner asserts that specific structures of
social-property relations will give rise to specific strategies for the
reproduction of these relations. In feudal society, in common with most
pre-capitalist societies, and in fundamental contrast with capitalist
society - a system which appears as the antithesis or negation of
feudalism - the vast amount of production was agrarian or land-based,
and the vast amount of land was held or possessed (though rarely owned
outright) by peasants or small-scale cultivators. First and foremost,
peasants produced for family subsistence and marketed only surpluses
beyond their needs for reproduction and their financial obligations to
lords. For feudal lords to derive a steady income, they were therefore
forced to coerce the peasantry to give up the surplus from the produce
of the peasants' holdings. Additionally, in order to limit the market in
free labor, lords forced peasants to work on the lords' own land, the
home farm or demesne. The relationship determining the 21/ economic
reproduction and survival of these main classes was therefore of a
political or extra-economic nature. This relationship was in fundamental
contrast to that in capitalism where the economic reproduction of the
main classes is fundamentally, though not entirely, of an economic
nature due to its mediation by the market. In other words, in
capitalism, workers' labor power is bought and sold in the marketplace,
and is not directly coerced by political communities, which is typically
the case in feudalism. This political or extra-economic relationship is
at the core of reproduction strategies of lords and peasants in most
parts of medieval Europe.
Peasants desired to maintain the possession of their lands and in the
best conditions possible. Brenner argues that the desirable conditions
for peasants were full property rights on the land and payment of a
small fixed, non-economic rent. However, as they demonstrated in clear
examples of class conflict in the fourteenth century, peasants had
visions and practical demands for the entire removal of the lord and the
manor, This was by no means a desire for capitalism. Peasants aimed to
achieve this goal towards better conditions vis-a-vis their lords by
strengthening their local communal organizations or institutions of
self-government, and by defending the force of custom in their lord's
manorial and borough courts; not by specializing and competing against
each other on the market. One cannot examine peasants' strategies for
reproduction in a political vacuum: the pressure from lordship had a
crucial determinant effect on peasant's lives and their approach to
production and community.
The lords' goal was to maintain or improve their controls over the
peasants' surplus, and also over peasants' bodies, in order to restrict
a market in peasant labor power, thus avoiding competition between lords
and thereby improved conditions for peasants. Lords did so by
strengthening serfdom, and by generating income channels through their
broader manorial jurisdictional capacity - founding market centers and
small towns or villages, for example. The ability for lords to control
serfdom (squeeze and control the peasantry) could only be achieved by an
increase in their military and legal powers. Their means for achieving
this was what Brenner describes as 'political accumulation.' It was the
accumulation of territory, government offices, and political alliances
that determined the level of power feudal lords and monarchs wielded not
only 22/over each other but over peasants. Political accumulation and
state building increased social cohesion amongst lords but it was
difficult because of the decentralized, fragmented nature of power in
feudal societies which forced lords to compete with each other for
power, resources and peasants.
For Brenner, feudal social-property relations gave rise to other
strategies for reproduction, Peasants' most pressing concern were the
survival of their families and the continuity of the family line in the
property they possessed, and they had to do this in very challenging
conditions. This point cannot be emphasized too strongly. As Brenner
says, 'the price of business failure was intolerable, and if peasants
got this wrong they faced debilitating poverty and potential starvation.
So peasants tended to have large families to ensure security in old age;
and where the size of holdings allowed, peasants tended to subdivide
holdings in order to provide the means for young heirs to get married
early and to set up for themselves. This strategy served both to enable
the continuance of the family line and to ensure young heirs were not a
burden for too long on their parents. This occurred even where the
custom was primogeniture. Rather than specialize, peasants typically
diversified their production of necessities to meet as many of their
subsistence needs as possible and to avoid market dependence and the
insecurity it brought in the face of potential bad harvests. They
marketed only surpluses, if there were any.
For lords, in addition to political accumulation through warfare,state
building and hegemonic display which enabled them to maintain their
status and 23/ political power both in relation to other lords and to
the free and unfree peasants on their estates, their main strategy for
reproduction was 'extensive' economic growth. Because peasants possessed
the vast majority of the land, and because of the political nature of
the relationship between lords and peasants, lords were denied any
opportunities to invest productively on land outside of their demesnes
in order to increase the labor productivity of the peasantry. They were
therefore compelled to extend their lands by taking them from other
lords (and monarchs) or by new colonization in which peasants were
encouraged to break new ground either by being offered favorable
tenurial terms or by the use of force. As a result of these reproductive
strategies,
feudal economic development manifested a two-sided conflictive
interaction: between a developing system of production for subsistence
through which the class of peasant possessors aimed to reproduce
themselves and provide for the continuity of their families, and a
developing system of surplus extraction by extra-economic compulsion, by
which the class of feudal lords aimed to reproduce themselves as
individuals and as a ruling class.
These reproductive strategies were determined by feudal society
social-property relations and, specific to these relations, these in
turn determined overall demographic and economic development patterns
peculiar to feudalism from the establishment of these relations in the
tenth and eleventh centuries to around 1300. These patterns were rapid
population growth, the extension of production and colonization of new
lands, urbanization and the increasing sophistication of international
trade due to lordship demands for military equipment and other luxuries,
and increasing political centralization and state formation. In turn
however these feudal development patterns led to specific feudal forms
of crisis. Feudal crises were characterized by the following: 24/
overpopulation and severe underemployment on materially finite and
jurisdictionally defined resources; declining labor productivity in the
face of limited application of available techniques despite the
increased land productivity from the increase in worker inputs in the
thirteenth century (a period which saw population expansion, partial
commercialization and dependency); reduced demand for manufactured
goods, and a consequent decline in urban production and trade; a
declining rate of increase in the feudal levy on peasants over time; and
an increase in warfare as lords sought to compensate for the reduced
income derived from an increasingly debilitated peasantry. These
elements of feudal crisis led to a downward economic spiral through the
increased fiscal and jurisdictional pressure on peasant production which
had already been pushed beyond the capacity that resources allowed. This
crisis was compounded by terrible weather between 1315 and 1318 which
caused a series of bad harvests, animal disease, and famine which killed
10% of the population. Then a series of devastating plagues in 1348-9
and again in the 1360s killed half the population of Europe.
There is an increasing tendency among historians to the increase in
[exogenous shocks]...Brenner argues that there was a strong exogenous
impact on the feudal crisis, but he argues that it was the crisis of
overpopulation, malnutrition, and the increased impositions on peasant
production and warfare which were determined by feudal
property-relations that left peasants inordinately exposed to famine and
infection in this period. [As to warfare as exogenous]...avoiding
Brenner's thesis that conflict between and among ruling classes is
dialectically integrated within the broader social-property relations.
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