Footnote. posted by Richard Seymour

A tiny bit of background on a tiny bit of that Brenner-Wood thesis. Perry Anderson will relegate an absolutely crucial argument to a footnote for the sake of narrative fluency. This is a footnote from page 182 of Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism:

A full awareness of the dynamism of the feudal mode of production has been one of the most important gains of medieval historiography in the last decades. Just after the Second World War, Maurice Dobb could repeatedly write, in his classic Studies in the Development of Capitalism, of the 'low level of technique' and the 'meagre yield from land', the 'inefficiency of feudalism as a system of production', and 'the stationary state of labour productivity at the time' ... Despite warnings from Engels, such views were at the time probably widespread among Marxists; although it should be noted that Rodney Hilton specifically demurred, criticising Dobb for 'a tendency to assume that feudalism was always and inevitably backward as an economic system ... In actual fact, until the end of the thirteenth century, feudalism was, on the whole, an expanding system. In the ninth century and even earlier there were a number of technical innovations in productive methods which were a great advance on the methods of classical antiquity. Vast areas of forest and marsh were brought into cultivation, population increased, new towns were built, a vigorous and progressive artistic and intellectual life was to be found in all the cultural centres of Western Europe'.

This is the argument not only of Rodney Hilton, but of Guy Bois and Georges Duby and many other recent Marxist historians of feudalism.

Anderson goes on to argue in the main text that the technological developments (water mill, iron-plough, marling and three-field system) were insufficient in and of themselves. There had to be a social form, a mode of production, that would utilise them. Gunpowder was invented either by the Chinese or the Arabs, but its invention has historically been attributed to Roger Bacon because a) the formula for it appeared in work attributed to him and b) it was used widely in the West as a technology of war and class rule. The feudal mode of production facilitated its use, in other words. Similarly, the feudal mode of production had to adapt or become 'crystallised', in Anderson's terms, to put these inventions to general use. Anderson also argues that part of the reason for this dynamism was that the peasants, the direct producers, had a certain amount of independence - and therefore a reason to innovate. Feudal dynamism also fed class struggle. The peasants, whether incipient kulaks (a new stratum of rich peasants) or paupers, were directly aligned against the landlords with their parasitic demands for more tax, more rent service, more Droit Du Seigneur (not merely a right to deflower peasant virgins, whatever you might have heard). Hence, class struggle: appeals to public justice over excessive seigneurial claims, withdrawal of labour services ("proto-strikes", Anderson calls this), chicanery over weights and measures, pressure for rent reduction etc. The lords, ecclesiastical or secular, fought back by fabricating new dues, employing direct violence or seizing communal land. During the 12th and 13th centuries, despite the ability of some peasants and communities of peasants to lease lands from nobles eager for cash, there was a renewed wave of enserfment, and peasant holdings were worn down gradually by the twin pressures of population growth and class struggle. Everywhere, class struggle was what drove and defined economic growth. It was a struggle by peasants and lords to reproduce themselves that created the productive dynamism of feudal Europe.

Similarly, the new urban centres and markets were typically dependent upon the rural elite for protection, and the lords in turn could scoop off quite a substantial chunk of profit from long-distance trade. Even where the urban centres acquired autonomy, the guilds strictly controlled production and there was no general separation between the producer and the means of production. There was some manufacture in northern Italian towns which could be taken for capitalist enterprise, but the largest segments of capital were usuruous and mercantile.

I'll leave the summary there. Just to clarify, this is by way of a partial introduction to a jot or two on critics of that Brenner-Wood thesis I brought up the other day.