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From Feudalism to Capitalism | Part V Harman is joined in his emphasis on the crucial role of productive forces by younger Marxist historians such as Neil Davidson and older ones such as Henry Heller, who together represent a third popular, more inclusive perspective on the origins of capitalism. They do, in fact, drive us back to Marx in our search for the next steps in the transition.  The growth of trade, as Marx points out, led to the export of English wool to Flanders and northern Italy where wage-labor cloth industries briefly flourished in the late 14thC in Flanders and the late 15thC in Italy.  But both experiments failed due to an economic crisis, to worker resistance, and, at the end, to the knock-on effects of the enclosure of the English countryside at the start of the 16thC.   With loss of the commons and the conversion of 10% of the small-acre crop lands into large-acre pastureland, Marx reminds us, numbers of the English peasantry were separated from t...

  From Feudalism to Capitalism | Part IIII To make their case, the “rustic economism” camp, as Brennerites are sometimes called, must ignore not only the role of trade and towns and commodity production in and for urban markets, but also the flight of peasants to the cities.  More striking still, they fail to account for three profound European-wide forces that accelerated the transition to capitalism from the 16th to the 18thC – namely the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.  About those three factors, more later. Moreover, what both of these rival theories (Dobb-Brenner and Pirenne-Wallerstein) ignore is the development of forces of production under feudalism that eventually made a capitalist mode of production possible.  Chris Harman, a champion of the role of “productive forces” in the birth of capitalism, and a critic of both of the other camps, points out in “From Feudalism to Capitalism,” a long 1989 article in International Socialism, Marx’s a...

From Feudalism to Capitalism | Part III The first to weigh in on the subject after Marx was a non-Marxist, the Belgian historian, Henri Pirenne.  In his 1927 study, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade, he sees the preconditions for capitalism taking shape between the 11th and the 14thC.  International trade, which had been suspended in the years of Islamic control over the Mediterranean, revived as the Muslim population retreated from southern Europe and the Levant with each advance of the Crusades.  That in turn spurred the rise of a merchant class and the growth of most of the major European cities – cities located at the strategic transportation crossroads of major rivers and outlets to the sea.  Nuremberg, Berlin, Venice, Florence, Genoa, Pisa, Bruges, Ghent and Hamburg were all medieval creations, and even London, Paris, and Milan saw significant growth in the 11th, 12th and 13thC.   By 1450, Pirenne points out, the economy of Europ...

  From Feudalism to Capitalism | Part II Skip ahead 900 years and cross the Channel to England, and we find laissez-faire industrial capitalism at high tide.  Kings, nobles and clergy have been reduced to figureheads, replaced by a ruling class of bankers, merchants, mine-owners, mill-owners and financial speculators, all preoccupied with money, profit and the accumulation of capital.  The peasant class has been wiped out and nearly half the population and most of the wealth now reside in cities.  Everyone who works, whether rural or urban, works for wages.  Except among those who make their own clothes, all production is for someone’s profit.  Markets are everywhere, from the smallest Cotswold village to the vast sprawl of Birmingham, Manchester and London.   With the British Empire at its height, goods are being exported to, and imported from, every corner of the globe.   Marx offers an explanation for this profound change in Capital, ...

From Feudalism to Capitalism | Part I The first question is, “Why should socialists even study the transition?” After all, it happened centuries ago.  The answer is that there are many aspects of that now completed dialectical process that parallel the one we are presently in the midst of – aspects that provide vital insights into how far along we are in the next stage of economic evolution.  And how rough and uneven such massive transitions are when they involve the total reorganization of society.   The second question, “What actually happened back then?” has many parts, all of them hotly debated among Marxist historians, sociologists and economists since WWII.  The chief issues are: When did the transition to capitalism happen? Where did it take place first? In towns and cities or in the countryside?  In England or on the continent? How long did it take to complete? What were the contributing factors? And finally, was Marx right or does his interpretatio...

           The modern reader frequently charges nineteenth-century fiction—and Dickens' longer novels in particular—with a penalty for excess baggage. Orwell, writing in 1939, complains:  In the end the original story has been buried under the details.  And in all of Dickens's most characteristic passages it is the same. His imagination overwhelms everything, like a kind of weed.1 Orwell has chiefly in mind the exuberance with which Dickens floods the immediate fictional moment, but later critics—including Leavis, Garis, and Frye—broaden the attack. They find the tangled subplots of the longer books especially off-putting: to them, squads of satellite figures divert the novel's thrust; they clutter or simply complicate argument and form, giving us a busier book but not a better or a subtler one.            In recent years one rarely hears such carping. The current generation of critics, caring less for concision...