Feudal Mode of Production

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Feudal Mode of Production

THE FEUDAL MODE OF PRODUCTION IN THE ANALYSES OF MARX, ENGELS, AND LENIN

LATER MARXIST DEBATES AND THE TRANSITION FROM FEUDALISM TO CAPITALISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The feudal mode of production appears in the theorization of successive socioeconomic formations provided by Karl Marx (18181883), where it precedes the capitalist mode of production. Marx developed the concept of the feudal mode of production, in particular, in the section on Pre-capitalist Economic Formations of the Grundrisse (18571858) and in chapter 47 of the first volume of Capital (1867). He was not, however, interested in providing an account of the main features of feudal society as much as he was in focusing on the distinctive characteristics of capitalism compared to previous modes of production. In analyzing the feudal mode of production and its decline, he also tried to pinpoint the main factors that historically explain the rise of capitalism. The original formulations provided by Marx, Friedrich Engels (18201895), and Vladimir I. Lenin (18701924) viewed the feudal mode of production as an essentially economic dynamic of subjugation and exploitation. Subsequently, three main problems have framed twentieth-century Marxist scholarly debates on the feudal mode of production: its relations with serfdom, its interactions with feudalism as a political and juridical concept, and the reasons for its collapse and the transition to capitalism.

THE FEUDAL MODE OF PRODUCTION IN THE ANALYSES OF MARX, ENGELS, AND LENIN

Marxs definition of the feudal mode of production rests largely on the concept of feudal rent, which characterizes both relations of production and ways to extract surplus from the direct producers. The feudal rent requires the existence of large agricultural productive units (manors, demesne) owned by a landlord who, through coercive means, is able to force peasants to pay a rent in the form of labor (corvée), produce, or monetary tributes. In exchange, peasants living in villages are allowed to possess small individual landholdings (strips, virgates) and to access forests and pastures as common land. Surplus extracted as feudal rent reveals a relation of personal subordination between the peasant and the landlord, which is confirmed by the fact that the landlord is the supreme political authority over the geographical unit (the fief) that contains the demesne, peasants plots, and common land.

At the same time, the landlord is also a vassal, a personal subordinate of a higher-level noble or of the sovereign, who recognizes the landlords feudal authority in exchange for military services. Traditional customsa theme touched on in Engelss Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1892)play a decisive role in sustaining these webs of hierarchies, obligations, and subjection, which appear natural and immutable. Finally, for Marx and Engels, the feudal mode of production reflects a radical opposition between the countryside and the city, which remains economically marginal and undeveloped.

Engelss discussion of feudalism, especially in the Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), balanced Marxs emphasis on economic causal relations with the significance of communal landowner-ship as a source of peasant resistance to the landlord. Such themes also surfaced in debates on the feudal mode of production in revolutionary Russia. Nikolai Bukharin (18881938) and especially Lenins The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) describe czarist Russia as a feudal society where the oppressed peasants constitute a serfdom that retains strong connections with communal forms of property. In Lenin, moreover, Russian feudalism is not a single mode of production but rather a social formation where other modes, including a rising capitalism, exist alongside feudal landholding under the authority of a strong, centralized absolutist state. As in other parts of eastern Europe, feudal landlords show for Lenin the tendency to evolve and become bourgeois agrarian Junkers who, in what Lenin calls the Prussian road, start hiring waged laborers to produce for the market.

LATER MARXIST DEBATES AND THE TRANSITION FROM FEUDALISM TO CAPITALISM

The issues raised by Lenins discussion of feudalismon the role of serfdom, political absolutism, and the modes of transition to capitalismresonated in postwar Marxist debates. There, moreover, the geographical focus of the feudal mode of production was broadened beyond the European context as Marxist scholars identified feudal economic and political relations in the shogunate during the Tokugawa age in Japan (1600s to mid-1800s), in imperial Ethiopia (late 1800s to 1970s), and, more controversially, in prerevolutionary China.

A major object of debate concerned the relations between the feudal mode of production and feudalism intended as a broad political, juridical, and ideological construct. Non-Marxist historians (Marc Bloch, Otto Hintze, Robert Boutruche, Georges Duby) have advanced this latter perspective, which, however, also influences the thorough Marxist analysis proposed by Perry Anderson (1974). He sees the construction of the feudal mode of production in Europe, and its local specificities, not just as products of economic causality. They are also a reflection of different forms of parcellization of sovereignty and of shifting interactions between juridical concepts of private property in Roman law and village warrior aristocracy in the Germanic tradition. Conversely, he regards the rise of western European absolute monarchies in the 1500s and 1600swhen feudalism was also established in eastern Europeas a sign of transformation in societies whose feudal economies are increasingly producing for international commodity markets.

Andersons view markedly contrasts with that of Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst (1975), who argue that the political forms of feudalism are irrelevant to define the feudal mode of production, which was an economic formation based on a tax-rent surplus extraction that relied entirely on the aristocracys control of the land. Consequently, for Hindess and Hirst, serfdom as a juridical condition is of secondary importance in conceptualizing the feudal mode of production. The concept, in fact, includes every rural society where landlords (not the state, as in the Asiatic mode of production) raise rent and taxes from peasants that are not waged laborers, as in capitalism, or slaves, as in antiquity.

Finally, from the 1950s to the 1970s, an important Marxist debate focused on the dynamics of the crisis of feudalism and its transition to capitalism. Economist Paul Sweezy (19102004) saw the feudal mode of production as an inefficient, unproductive, socioeconomic structure, which was ultimately destroyed by the growth of commodity markets and the rise of profit-oriented urban entrepreneurs. Robert Brenner opposed to this view an image of the feudal mode of production as a dynamic, differentiated, even market-oriented system, whose crisis is explained by changing forms of property and social relations. Therefore, in England, the state supported large landlords enclosures and the expulsion of peasants in the context of the Industrial Revolution, while in France feudal landownership was undermined by the resilience of small independent peasant agriculture. Other Marxist historians, like Maurice Dobb (19001976) and Rodney Hilton (19162002), more directly emphasized the role of class struggles between landlords and peasants in explaining the crisis and collapse of the feudal mode of production.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Perry. 1974. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. London: New Left.

Banaji, Jairus. 1976. The Peasantry in the Feudal Mode of Production: Towards an Economic Model. Journal of Peasant Studies 3 (3): 299320.

Gottlieb, Roger S. 1984. Feudalism and Historical Materialism: A Critique and a Synthesis. Science and Society 48 (1): 137.

Hindess, Barry, and Paul Hirst. 1975. Pre-capitalist Modes of Production. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Holton, Robert J. 1985. The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. New York: St. Martins Press.

Franco Barchiesi