>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 12/07/00 05:22PM >>>
Charles wrote:
>What is the comparison of the bourgeois class in feudal Spain and feudal
>England ? Don't these theories on the derivation of capitalism out of
>feudalism have to pay important attention to the bourgeoisie, who were a
>partially oppressed class in feudalism ? I hear a lot of discussion of
>landlords and tenant farmers, and peasants, but little of the bourgeoisie.
The enclosure movement in England helped convert feudal-style lords into
bourgeois land-owners (or rather, changed the property relations so that
bourgeois laws applied), so that industrial or full-blown capitalism
(M-C-M') prevailed there first. The urban bourgeoisie was relatively small
under feudalism.
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CB: The towns were small too in feudalism, no ? And there wasn't much of a rural
bourgeoisie during feudalism.
So, are we saying that the main source of personnel for the bourgeois class as it
rises up out of feudalism and starts to make capitalism is the feudal ruling class of
lords ? And that it was not so much the personnel of the small fry bourgeoisie from
the feudal period ? Or that M-C-M' ing was first built up big by the rural feudal
lords now become rural bourgeoisie before the old town merchants and money lenders ?
That is counterintuitive. Why would the rich class from the previous era be the main
ones to try the new style of wealth accumulation, when at the time the success of the
new style, capitalism, over the old style would not have seemed likely ? There is
abundant evidence from the following couple of hundred years that many feudal ruling
class members continued to live in the feudal manner of exploiting their wealth,
because the bourgeois had a long struggle with them to become the new ruling class.
The bourgeoisie had not yet at all become the ruling class in the 140!
0's and 1500's.
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Much of it was involved in merchant or money-lending
capitalism, which are incomplete versions of industrial capitalism that
were dependent on other modes of exploitation. When a proletariat arose in
the countryside, this helped to allow industrial capitalism in the cities
(often in small ones, where guild restrictions did not apply). The
agricultural revolution also helped to feed the urban proletariat.
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CB: Is there a claim by someone ( not necessarily you) that this new agricultural
bourgeoisie started M-C-M' ing madly before the
merchant/pirate/moneylending/manufacturing/ madding crowd in the towns and cities ,
and on the high seas ?
>Seems the presumptiive ( rebuttable , of course) theory should be
>something like the bourgeoisie/capitalists of capitalism derived from the
>bourgeoisie/small fry of feudalism and their struggle with the feudal
>ruling class ( of course with complications from peasant class struggles
>intertwined).
Of course there were struggles, but a lot of the sons of old-style
landlords became new-style capitalist landlords. The class struggle between
the old feudal ruling class and the rising bourgeoisie was quantitatively
different from that described by Marx and Engels between the bourgeoisie
and the proletariat, since replacing one ruling class with another is so
different from the movement toward the abolition of classes.
(((((((((((((
CB: Yes, but isn't part of the thing of calling the bourgeoisie revolutionary in many
ways sincere in _The Manifesto_ relative to the feudal ruling class. In describing the
bourgeoisie as a mixed revolutionary and yet rising EXPLOITING ruling class, they
really mean the revolutionary aspect, especially in relation to the feudal ruling
class. In this perod, the original Liberals were revolutionaries for their time. Free
Trade, Laissez-Faire, anti-government liberalism is vis-a-vis the ancien regimes of
Europe which still dominate government. And in the period we are discussing, the
bourgeoisie had not yet become the ruling class. That is not "completed" until the
1800's. The monarchs are a kind of transitional form between the feudal rulers and the
bourgeoisie. Sometimes the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the feudal lords and
church officials is with the monarchs representing the bourgeoisie ( kings go with the
most $$$) which doesn't seem revolutionary, but can be given t!
hat the bourgeoisie are a main revolutionary force in the period.
By the way, on Liberals. In the U.S. the shift of Liberals to pro-government, and
conservatives to anti-government ( originally conservatives were pro-government as it
was still associated with he old feudal aristocracy) was a long term inversion of the
relation of the two bourgeois book ends to government. Today's Neo-Liberals
privatization and anti-governmentism, neo-Free Trade is an inversion of the inversion.
These are true neo-Liberals in their anti-government strains in the long term sense.
