From Feudalism to Capitalism | Part IIII

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 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 assertion (in German Ideology, the Grundrisse, the 1859 Preface, as well as in Capital, vols. I and III) “that to understand the development of any mode of production you have to look at the interrelation between the development of forces of production and the relations of production.  Changes in the forces of production lead to small scale, cumulative changes in the relations between people which, eventually, throw into question the whole organization of society.” (Harman, p. 18)
Harman goes on to enumerate the vast social and technological changes that happened within the supposedly static world of feudalism:

•Despite wars and plagues and famine, the population of Europe doubled between the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Renaissance

•The economy was not static.  It grew slowly, albeit unevenly, at the average rate of one-half of one percent per year.  And labor productivity, even in the early medieval centuries (800 to 1100) grew 100%

•Key to that social and economic growth was the development of technological forces, including, in agriculture, the 3-field system, the water mill, the heavy-wheeled plough, the iron-tipped plough, the wheelbarrow, cultivating in strips rather than squares, harnessing a fast horse, rather than plodding oxen, to the front of a plough, and fertilizing with animal dung

•In medieval cities and towns innovations even more life-changing, more relation-changing were happening, innovations that would later equip the capitalist world: the crank, the mechanical clock, the spinning wheel, the lathe, eyeglasses, new dye-making and shipbuilding techniques, paper-making, the compass, and, near the very end of the era, printing

•Doubled productivity also meant a rise above subsistence and the benefit of surplus product to sell in nearby market towns (and the wherewithal to purchase town-made tools for the farm); the compass led to a 100% increase in trade between Europe and the near East; eyeglasses allowed more precise handiwork and a longer reading lifetime.  The mechanical clock changed everyone’s notion of temporality and the workday itself.   All of these forces of production provided the pre-conditions for capitalist relations and a new mode of production.

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