Was the development of absolutism a response to the rising capitalist class and/or republicanism? My knowledge of late medieval history is really not as strong as it could be so I’m interested to hear what people think
Recently played the game Pentiment, which is excellent in bringing this time period to life - albeit very boring as a game. Part of the plot involves peasants revolting and demanding the twelve articles. These came out of the German Peasants’ War of 1525, which was put down brutally as the nobility slaughtered 100-300k peasants.
In the modern context I think this is interesting to think about. Probably 1 person in 1000 has ever heard of the 1525 German Peasants’ War. 300k people being killed during a revolt in the modern day US, achieving none of their demands, would be a cataclysm. But generations endured that period and the ones before & after it. To me this is an antidote to some of the eschatological thinking I often encounter on the left that is like “this can’t go on for much longer”; it will indeed go on for longer. Much longer than you think.
I thought pentiment was pretty fun 🥲
lol understandable, I did finish it & was glad to have done so but thought it was a slog that was carried by its amazing themes & setting much more than its gameplay. Also, why did they have northern cardinal birdsong in the middle of europe
I think, if we are talking “Feudalism in decay” you actually want to be looking closer to the 1600’s-1700’s, and I think the commenters saying Mercantilism/Absolutism are closer to the mark than the peasant revolts.
The peasant revolts were all within the framework of Feudalism lorded over by Christendom, and largely a question of what kind of local concessions were to be given by The Church as part of local church doctrine.
100 years or so later, we see the waning of The Church’s direct authority over the feudal structures as the monarchs mostly give up the pretense of divine mandate and feudal partitioning to the end of centralizing power within the crown itself.
Pentiment is a good shout though, and I agree on the point that “collapse” can be anything from a year to three centuries.
Keep in mind that that number could easily be exaggerated for dramatic effect as a deterrent for future ambitious peasants. Also, just because that particular event didn’t lead to sudden change doesn’t mean it ended the struggle. Eventually, feudalism did indeed come to an end.
That being said, millions die every year due to the depravity of capitalism. Yet, in the west, nobody bats an eye. we are still well insulated compared to the struggles in the global south. They have been fighting for decades already. The pace of change is quickening day by day.
I am not sure exactly what you are referring to here. Maoists in the Philippines?
I mean…Just pick a country in the global south or even in eastern europe, yeah.
I think we don’t have a proper name for it, since we just think of it all as fuedalism. Maybe marcantilism can be thought of that way as the other poster said but I don’t think that’s a 1:1 comparison. When I think “late stage fuedalism”, I think the late Ancien Regime in France, where the fuedal institutions had become so calcified that they were simply incapable of responding to the rise of liberalism and the eventual French Revolution.
In this analogy, the remaining fuedal regimes reestablishing the Bourbons maps to Capital restoration in the Soviet Union.
I think we don’t have a proper name for it, since we just think of it all as fuedalism
Isn’t this telling. That after a few centuries, the same will be true of capitalism/fascism - one is simply a tool trying to maintain the other.
I mean, people already largely think of America as just capitalism, even though it’s had a lot of the features of fascism for a long time.
and by a long time you mean basically for it’s entire existence
This is a very important point. Most people think of all society from tribes up to 1600CE as one big “it was basically all kings”/medieval/dark ages bloc. Very few people could actually tell you about the development through those various eras, such as the philosophies, societal movements and technologies developed, invented, and at play throughout those millennia (including myself, I know shit all).
To ask “what was feudalism in decay” is like asking “why is glass transparent”; It sounds simple, but you need to understand a whole bunch of other shit first for the answer to actually be meaningful.
Mercantilism, I’d say. It was the nobility/aristocracy attempting to corral the supplanting of the old feudal manorial political economy with the new international trade and markets political economy by putting it in a box that they could still control. Hence the American Revolution being spurred in part by the policies regarding the East India Company.
A good example is to contrast Colonial Spain to Colonial England. One was locked in the decaying form of colonial conquest due to an over-reliance on Gold/Silver and religious control (Spain), while the other headed full speed into the Industrial Revolution and capitalism despite it ravaging and destroying their society and populace (England).
Spain valued stability and good conditions for Spaniards in the core over adapting new industrial developments because they had a de-centralized feudal-like structure with powerful conservative aristocracy, whereas England had no qualms about feeding the English population into the meatgrinder via mass proletarianization and going full speed into the void, and had the centralized system to enforce it.
This obviously came to a head when the Spanish sail armada was destroyed by English steam ships.
Spanish sail armada was destroyed by English steam ships
When did that happen?
I was conflating two different things in my head, the 1588 battle of gravelines where the Spanish armada was heavily damaged by British fire ships and storms and British naval power in the age of steam. This was a bit before the age of steam, which was more around 1770, 200 years later. Britain did adapt to the age of steam a lot better than the Spaniards did but I was incorrect.
I am once again asking hexbear to use a more rigorous definition of fascism: https://redsails.org/really-existing-fascism/
What this means for an equivalent in feudalism is interesting, but an odd question once the definition is more rigorous
I don’t think there is a great medieval analogy because European feudalism was formed from a decaying Empire. Medieval China is a good example of what a culture in that time period looks like that has a more or less unified polity.
Absolutism surely is a response to growing capitalist class, and in the sense it is like fascism because its goal is to “preserve the old order by disciplining the laboring class.” But I would call it an evolution of feudalism rather than feudalism in decay, because it’s a more efficient form of government.
I think it looks like enclosing the commons and restricting peasant access to community wealth as the lords try to protect and increase their profits as their economic order approaches its natural conclusion.
absolutism
I think it really depends on your perspective. Because fascism is another way of describing the Imperial boomerang, so from a international perspective, there’s not really a difference between capitalism in decay and capitalism in general, it’s just that from a Imperial core perspective, you don’t see the fascism that upholds the Empire until the boomerang comes back around to hit you. Because there’s nothing left in the periphery to plunder. You have to plunder the core
I like this question a lot. I think I’d agree to an extent that absolutism was a response to the rising capitalist class yeah. In essence they gave in to the burghers economic demands, (pushing towarda capitalist economic relations in England in the 1200s and 1300s, in France in the 1500s and 1600s) but refused to hand over the highest reigns of power. Absolutism is the result of their maintaining the formal political structure of feudalism over top the structures of capitalism, growing more absolutist the greater the burghers power grows.
My view is that what most people typically think of when they hear “feudalism” and “medieval society” is this proto-absolutist states 1300s-1500s western Europe. So their conception of feudalism is is already feudalism in decay, its economic, social and even political structures rapidly being hollowed out by the emerging bourgeois in the cities.
protestantism
There’s probably other authors here, but a dominant theme of Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch was that capitalism was feudalism in decay. The enclosure of the commons and the switch to waged labor was a reaction of the ruling class to the threat of social mobility created by technological development.
It’s been a few years, but I don’t think Federici explicitly placed it as “feudalism in decay.” I also don’t agree with that take because capitalism is more progressive than feudalism in a Marxist sense.
I see the point you’re making, how Federici characterizes the violence against women as a necessary bludgeon against the peasant class to proletarizse them, but it’s not for the same materliast reasons that fascism utilizes violence.
If we were to continue with this line of thought, I could say that capitalism was born in the dying body of feudalism. However, I think the transformative nature of feudalism–> capitalism is much different than liberalism --> fascism. That’s because fascism’s goal is essentially to destroy proletarian power to bring capitalist order back. That is to say, fascist violence is to preserve capitalism while the violence in Caliban and the Witch is to part of the transformation into capitalism.
Federici is a great read, but I think she has her gaps for historical materialism.
By the late Middle Ages the feudal economy was doomed, faced with an accumulation crisis that stretched for more than a century. We deduce its dimension from some basic estimates indicating that between 1350 and 1500 a major shift occurred in the power-relation between workers and masters. The real wage increased by 100%, prices declined by 33%, rents also declined, the length of the working-day decreased, and a tendency appeared toward local self-sufficiency. Evidence of a chronic disaccumulation trend in this period is also found in the pessimism of the contemporary merchants and landowners, and the measures which the European states adopted to protect markets, suppress competition and force people to work at the conditions imposed. As the entries to the registers of the feudal manors recorded, “the work [was] not worth the breakfast” (Dobb 1963: 54). The feudal economy could not reproduce itself, nor could a capitalist society have “evolved” from it, for self-sufficiency and the new high-wage regime allowed for the “wealth of the people,” but “excluded the possibility of capitalistic wealth” (Marx 1909, Vol I, 789).
It was in response to this crisis that the European ruling class launched the global offensive that in the course of at least three centuries was to change the history of the planet, laying the foundations of a capitalist world-system, in the relentless attempt to appropriate new sources of wealth, expand its economic basis, and bring new workers under its command. … I refer to the social processes that characterized the “feudal” reaction" and the development of capitalist relations with the Marxian concept of “primitive accumulation”… Marx introduced the concept of “primitive accumulation” at the end of Capital Volume I to describe the social and economic restructuring that the European ruling class initiated in response to its accumulation crisis, and to establish (in polemics with Adam Smith) that: (i) capitalism could not have developed without a prior concentration of capital and labor; and that (ii) divorcing the workers from the means of production, not the abstinence of the rich, is the source of capitalist wealth. Primitive accumulation, then, is a useful concept, for it connects the “feudal reaction” with the development of a capitalist economy, and it identifies the historical and logical conditions for the development of the capitalist system, “primitive” (“originary”) indicating a precondition for the existence of capitalist relations, as much as a specific event in time. (p 62- 63, emphasis Federici’s)
I see your point on the transformation part, but I still think the analogy is relevant. In both cases (transformation from feudalism into capitalism and capitalism into fascism) you’re seeing a shift in relations born from the reaction of the ruling class to a crisis. Capitalism was born out of the desire to preserve feudalism that was untenable; so fascism arises when preserving the existing capitalist relations is the desired goal but the outcome is no longer possible.
Tibet. Tsarist Russia maybe. Thailand, maybe.
