From Feudalism to Capitalism | Part V

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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 the land, driven either into the city or into their cottages to make goods from raw materials supplied by merchants.   The merchants, who had earlier only bought and sold wool, took advantage of the newly available labor force to undertake a so-called “putting out” system, employing native peasants to weave products on their own premises and return them to the merchants to sell in foreign and domestic markets.  

Thus, a medieval buying system became a transitional putting out system, which could morph into a fully capitalist system when sufficient primitive accumulation enabled those who possessed the raw materials to own the rest of the means of production.   We can see the progress in that direction over two centuries: in the 14thC, the English turned only 4% of the wool they sheared into cloth; by mid-15thC the figure had risen to 50%; and by mid-16thC they were making 86% of their own native wool into cloth. 

Still, despite any number of pre-conditions falling into place, capitalism at the beginning of the 16thC, even in England, was analogous to a very weak zygote trying desperately to attach itself to the uterine wall – a low-profile, low-percentage prospect at best.   Chris Harman suggests several phenomena, several significant developments in the next century, that enabled would-be capitalism to come to full term. 

The rise of the absolutist state in England, oddly enough, was a vital factor in its growth.  Harman quotes Engels who sees it not just as a changed form of feudal exploitation, but as a political form arising when the warring classes (merchants vs. nobles in this case) balance each other so nearly that the state, as ostensible mediator, acquires independent power and control.  The Tudor monarchs played the exploiting classes off against each other, allowing merchants to become landowners and acquire titles, while nobles were encouraged to do deals with merchants and small-time capitalist farmers.   Meanwhile, the peasants who’d been driven off their land by the new policy of enclosure, were forced to sell their labor for wages, either in the city or on country estates.  Their alternative, as Marx points out, was to die of starvation or, should they steal food, be hanged under the Tudors’ new Vagabond Acts.  The choice was the yoke of capitalism, you might say, or capital punishment. 


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