Historical Materialism: Social Structure And Social Change In The

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Historical Materialism: Social Structure and Social Change in the Middle Ages Stephen H. Rigby University of Manchester Manchester, United Kingdom Marxism and medieval society When assessing Marx and Engels’s intellectual legacy, even those who, like myself, would reject their revolutionary outlook, their political economy, and their dialectical materialist philosophy are likely to retain an admiration for their social and historical theory: historical materialism. In the words of a former Manchester medievalist, it is Marxism’s conception of history which is now “the source of all its value, and its justification.”1 An analysis of medieval social relations certainly played an important role in the development of Marx and Engels’s social theory and political economy since, they argued, in order to understand the capitalist economy, the ways in which it differed from and emerged out of precapitalist forms of production, distribution, and exchange had also to be examined (25:139, 168).2 How then did Marx and Engels characterize medieval social structure, and what did they identify as the forces producing change within medieval society?3 How have their ideas been put to use in later Marxist work? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the Marxist approach? Here, we will concentrate on the account of medieval society offered by Marx and Engels themselves since, besides being a fascinating topic in its own right, many of the conceptual problems in more recent Marxist historiography have their roots in the work of Marxism’s founding fathers.4 The primacy of the productive forces Writing at a time when economic history did not yet exist as an academic discipline, Marx and Engels argued that previous historians had only studied the surface of history, that is, the realm of politics and of conflicting systems of ideas. As a result, the “real basis of history”—the production of food, drink, clothing, housing, and other material goods—had been disregarded Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34:3, Fall 2004. Copyright © by Duke University Press / 2004 / $2.00. even though such production was a precondition of all other human activity: “men must work before they can fight for domination, pursue politics, religion, philosophy etc.” (5:41–42, 55; 24:192–99, 467–68; 25:26; 37:804). In particular, Marx and Engels attacked those thinkers who accepted that material factors predominated in modern society but continued to see politics or religion as reigning supreme in the ancient and medieval worlds: “the Middle Ages could not live on Catholicism, nor the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the mode in which they gained a livelihood which explains why here politics, and there Catholicism, played the chief part” (35:92–93). This process of providing human subsistence involves the putting to work of particular “productive forces” through which specific raw materials (e.g., wool) are transformed by means of particular instruments of production (e.g., looms, fulling mills), forms of energy (e.g., water power), human labor-power, and scientific and technological knowledge within a particular technical division of labor (e.g., between weavers and fullers). Yet what was important for Marx and Engels was not the “tautology that humanity had to eat, drink etc. before it could do anything else” (25:83; 28:413; 34:236, 329) but rather the significance of this fact for society as a whole. Marx explains this significance in his “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economyy (1859), one of the key statements of the historical materialism which Marx and Engels had first set out in systematic form in The German Ideologyy (1845–46). Here, Marx claims that “in the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production” (29:263, my emphasis). In a famous aphorism in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx illustrates this point with the help of a medieval example: “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist” (6:165–66). Pierre Dockès wonders whether Marx intended this aphorism as “a joke.”5 In fact, the claim that the form taken by society’s relations of production is determined by the level of development of its productive forces, a claim which Cohen labels the “Primacy Thesis,” was one of Marx and Engels’s most central and frequently repeated ideas (5:34– 36, 38, 43, 53, 59–60, 63, 74, 81–84, 89, 231; 6:175, 259, 319–20, 348–49; 9:211–12; 24:307; 24:415; 25:254; 28:419–20; 29:38; 30:311, 533–34; 37:778; 38:96, 100; 40:186; 42:297).6 Thus, while Marx and Engels saw most economic laws as specific to particular societies (25:135–36; 35:625– 26), they regarded the correspondence of society’s relations of production or forms of property to the level of development of its productive forces as a 474 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 general law of human history (24:467–68; 25:135–36). Marx himself thus went out of his way to reject any credit for having discovered the role of class and class struggle in modern society. What he had discovered, he said, was rather that the existence of classes is “bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production” (39:62). As Marx’s aphorism about hand-mills and feudal lords shows, he and Engels explicitly applied the “Primacy Thesis” to precapitalist modes of production in general and to feudalism in particular (47:156). For the Middle Ages, The German Ideologyy identifies two main forms of property, that of the feudal lords and that of the independent urban artisan: “the organization of both was determined by the restricted conditions of production—the scanty and primitive cultivation of the land and the craft type of industry” (5:34–35). Similarly, for Engels, evidence for the claim that specific social classes were based in the way that a given society produces and exchanges its means of subsistence was to be found in “the feudal rule of the Middle Ages,” which “rested on the self-sufficient economy of small peasant communities” (24:192) and arose from “the then prevailing level of production in agriculture and industry” (26:248–49, 253–54). As usual, similar quotations can be found in Marx’s works, as when he claims that medieval industry found in the guild organization of production “the production relations which corresponded to it. Indeed, it posited these relations out of itself and developed them as its own immanent conditions” (29:38; see also 38:97). As we shall see below, this explanatory primacy of the productive forces was to be central to Marx and Engels’s account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism (see 493–98.). Estates and classes If the productive forces of medieval society were the foundation for its social relations, how did Marx and Engels characterize these relations? An immediate problem here is one of terminology. Marx and Engels often use the term classs to refer to any social group bound up in relations of production involving private property, as in the famous opening passage of the Communist Manifesto where “lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman” are included in the list of opposed “classes” which have struggled throughout history (6:482, 486; 24:321–22; 25:137). Yet, at other times, Marx and Engels drew a contrast between the classess of modern capitalist society, which are made up of legally equal citizens, and the social estatess characteristic of feudalism, the members of which possessed specific political and legal privileges, such Rigby / Historical Materialism 475 as the tax exemptions enjoyed by the nobility (1:303; 2:145, 364–65; 3:31– 33, 72, 80, 109, 112, 165–67). Thus, at first, the newly emergent urban burghers of the Middle Ages did not “break loose from the system of estates, but only formed a new estate” with its own specific privileges (5:79; 6:337, 486; 24:192; 25:96, 151–52). Eventually, however, the “social estates” of the Middle Ages, with their hereditary and legal privileges of rank and corporation, had given way to the free and equal citizens who made up the “classes” of modern capitalism: “modern society still has classes but no longer social estates” (5:90; 8:259, 336; 10:402; 16:160; 17:91; 20:77; 24:307; 25:97, 255; 26:344; 35:88, 178; 38:96). This recognition of the importance of estates within medieval society can be seen in Marx and Engels’s emphasis on the centrality of the Church within the feudal hierarchy since, even before the time of Charlemagne, the Church owned a third of all land and its property rights constituted “an essential element of contemporary agrarian relations” (24:449–50; 26:61–64, 66–67).7 Marx and Engels were aware of the ways in which clerics’ access to wealth differed from that of lay members of the landed nobility, whose property was theirs by individual hereditary right (37:595). They also realized that ecclesiastics in feudal societies did not only obtain their income in the form of feudal rent but also benefited from estate privileges such as tax exemption and the compulsory rendering of tithes by the laity (10:402, 404–5; 35:246). Marx and Engels argued that while modern society had an inherent tendency to polarize into two main classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie (3:266; 6:485; 13:57, 61), precapitalist societies were characterized by a complicated division “into various orders” involving “a manifold gradation of social rank.” Thus, the Middle Ages presents us with a complex hierarchy of “feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices [and] serfs” (5:35; 6:485; 20:68). It is this complexity which Engels’s Peasant War in Germanyy saw as characteristic of German society in the later Middle Ages where society was stratified into the aristocracy, the clergy, the rising lay lawyers, the urban patriciate and plebeians, and the peasants in the countryside, each of these groups having its own internal divisions and conflicts of interest (10:402–10). Nevertheless, despite Marx and Engels’s empirical recognition of the importance of estates and estate conflicts within feudalism and their emphasis on the complex, gradated structure of medieval society, it would be true to say that they never really provided a theoretical account of the nature of these estates or of their relationship to class inequalities (see 503–4 476 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 below). As a result, rather than exploring nonclass forms of social stratification, their analysis of medieval society remained focused on its relations of production and the dichotomic economic classes (lord and peasant, master and journeyman, etc.) that they produced. What was the nature of these relations in medieval society? Agrarian class structure: Exploitation and peasant possession of the productive forces Although he recognized the complexity of medieval social structure, Marx also argued that “in every form of society there is a particular branch of production which determines the position and importance of all the others and the relations obtaining in this branch accordingly determine those in all other branches.” Under feudalism, it was agriculture, in particular peasant farming, which was “predominant throughout Europe” (5:34; 6:349; 24:192; 25:164; 28:43–44). If antiquity started out from the town and its small territory, the Middle Ages started out from the country (5:33–34). How, then, did Marx analyze the relations of production of feudal agriculture? Relations of production are social relations of two types. The first is a relation between people and particular productive forces, as in the ownership of land by the Norman conquerors of England after 1066. The second is that between people and other people, as in the relation between the new Norman landlords and their peasant proprietors (35:243, 708). As Engels says in Anti-Dühring, g class societies are characterized by a domination of certain people over others “by virtue off and through the agency off the domination over things.” Thus, “throughout the Middle Ages large landed property was the prerequisite by means of which the feudal nobility came to have quit-rent peasants and corvée peasants” (25:173, original emphasis). For Marx, the key to understanding such property relationships is the existence of exploitation or the transfer of surplus laborr from the producers to the owners of the conditions of production (24:415; 37:778). The “essential difference” between the relations of production in particular societies, between those based on, say, slave-, serf- or free wage-labor, is therefore to be found in “the mode in which this surplus labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer” (35:226–27). What was the form of surplus laborr that characterized medieval agricultural production? For Marx and Engels, surplus laborr is defined in opposition to necessary labor, r that is, the labor which creates the subsistence goods needed Rigby / Historical Materialism 477 to satisfy “the wants of the producer and his family” (24:312; 28:399; 35:226; 37:776). Under feudalism, this necessary labor included the time expended by the peasants on producing food and manufactured goods, such as clothing, which were immediately used by the family. It also included the time spent by the peasants in making goods (such as yarn) which were then exchanged for necessities, such as salt or iron, which the peasant family could not produce for itself. In general, however, Marx and Engels saw the peasant economy of the Middle Ages as more or less a self-sufficient “natural economy” which was dominated by the production of use-values which were immediately consumed by the producers and within which only a “very insignificant portion” of the agricultural product entered circulation as commodities (24:312; 25:259; 26:557; 27:485–86; 28:59–60, 426, 430; 29:469–70; 35:736; 36:119; 37:332, 772–74, 780, 782, 786, 884–85). In contrast to necessary labor, surplus labor constitutes an “extra working time” over and above the labor needed for the reproduction of the producers and is labor which goes to “produce the means of subsistence for the owners of the means of production” such as the Norman baron or the Wallachian Boyard (35:243). Interestingly, Marx saw the clearest example of surplus labor as that performed by those feudal serfs who, in addition to working on their own plots of land, were required to render rent in the form of corvée labor on the demesnes of their landlords, work whose product could either be consumed directly by the lord and his household or sold by him for his own profit (35:243–46). The serf who “expends his labour power for six days” may thus be “working three days for himself, on his own field, and three days for his lord, on the field of the latter.” The labor in each case is likely to be identical in the use- or exchange-values which they create. Where the two differ is that the labor the peasant performs for his own subsistence is “voluntary” whereas that for his lord brings the producer no benefit and so has to be “forced” and “externally imposed” (28:530; 36:384–85). For Marx and Engels, as for modern Marxists such as Robert Brenner, the relationship between lord and peasant was thus one of “exploitation,” in which the peasant performed coerced, “unpaid” labor for the benefit of his lord (20:132–33; 26:274).8 In a famous passage in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels claim that the rise of capitalism has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self interest. . . . In one word, 478 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct brutal exploitation. (6:486– 87) Yet, in their later writings on political economy, Marx and Engels argue precisely the opposite, that it is under the conditions of coerced corvée labor that the reality of exploitation is most apparent, whereas under the capitalist relations of production, its existence is obscured and opaque. In the case of the “compulsory and gratuitous” corvée labor performed on the lord’s demesne, “surplus-labour has an independent, palpable form” since the “paid and unpaid parts of labor were visibly separated, separated in time and space” so that the existence of surplus labor is an “open secret” known by every serf.9 In the case of capitalism, by contrast, the coercive feudal relationship seems, on the surface, to have been replaced by a free, contractual relationship of equals. The capitalist buyer of labor-power appears to pay the wage laborer for his entire working time even though, Marx and Engels argued, in reality only a part of the laborer’s working day goes to produce the goods whose value pays his wages. Here, unlike labor rent, the “paid and the unpaid portions of labour are inextricably mixed with each other” so that “the nature of the entire transaction is completely masked” and “every trace” of the division between necessary and surplus labor is extinguished (20:132–33, 234, 252; 35:88, 245, 539–40; 37:776, 778). For Marx, the “transformation of labour rent into rent in kind changes nothing” in the nature of feudal rent per se; indeed, rent in kind is nearly always “accompanied by survivals of labour rent.” The difference between them is simply that the labor of the producer for himself and his labor for the landlord are no longer palpably separated by time and space. Rather, all production, agricultural and industrial, whether necessary or surplus labor, takes place on the land rented by the peasants. Labor here is no longer performed “under the direct supervision of the landlord or his representatives,” and rather than receiving surplus labor directly, the lord receives the product of that labor in the “natural form in which it is realised” (37:780–81). If surplus and necessary laborr are no longer divided by time and space, there is still a physical division between the necessary and the surplus productt so that, as in the case of corvée labor, exploitation continues to take an immediate and obvious form (35:88).10 In turn, Marx argued that although the rise of feudal ground-rent in money form had extremely important consequences for the development of feudalism and the rise of capitalism (see 497 below), in itself, money rent Rigby / Historical Materialism 479 involved “a mere change in form of rent in kind.” Here, a certain part of the peasant’s product is converted into commodities whose price is handed over to the landlord as rent. As in labor rent and rent in kind, the producer here still renders to his lord “unpaid labour for which no equivalent is returned” (37:783, 789). Under capitalism, surplus labor takes the form of the surplus-value embodied in the commodities produced by wage labor. This surplus-value is then divided, in the form of rent and profits, between landlords and employers. Under feudalism, by contrast, rent itself directly and immediately constitutes the surplus labor which passes into the hands of the landlord. While all surplus-value is surplus labor, not all surplus labor is surplus-value (25:209; 37:627–28, 770, 774, 778–79, 786, 789, 819, 870; 47:155–56, 180). In volume 1 of Capital, l Marx calculates that the corvée labor performed by Wallachian peasants in the nineteenth century ate up at least 56 of the 140 working days in the agricultural year but nevertheless concludes that this constituted a much lower rate of surplus labor extraction than that found in English industry and agriculture in his own day (35:246–47). As he says in volume 3 of Capital, l the low levels of productivity characteristic of the feudal mode of production mean that surplus labor will “naturally absorb a relatively smaller proportion of the direct producer’s total labour” than under more developed modes, particularly capitalism (37:780).11 Nevertheless, Marx and Engels did identify various factors which increased the lords’ pressure on the peasants to produce extra surplus labor, in particular the lords’ desire to take advantage of the growing availability of luxury goods and manufactures and, associated with it, their status-competition with the rising urban patriciate and tendency to fall into debt (10:403–4; 24:452; 32:534; 37:591). Marx distinguishes a number of ways in which surplus labor can be increased. One option (“absolute surplus labour”) is for the time spent on necessary labor to remain the same but for total labor time to be increased (35:510), as when peasants are required to spend extra days performing labor services or to devote extra time to producing goods which will be used to render an increased rent in kind or money rent. Another option (“relative surplus labour”) is for total labor time to remain the same but for the proportion of it spent on necessary labor to be reduced (35:511). The simplest way to achieve this is by cutting the living standards of the producers so that time spent on necessary labor is reduced, thus maximizing the time available for surplus labor. In practice, of course, there are physical limits beyond which living standards cannot be reduced without undermining the pro480 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 ducers’ ability to reproduce themselves. Engels believed that this limit had been reached in Germany by around 1500 (10:403–4, 409, 478–79), while more recent Marxists have seen the reduction of peasant living standards brought about by the lords’ surplus extraction as central to the explanation of the “Malthusian” crisis of subsistence experienced in the early fourteenth century.12 A second way to create relative surplus labor is to introduce new and more efficient methods of production so that the labor-time needed to produce a given standard of living is reduced, again freeing up a greater proportion of the working day for surplus labor. However, this assumes that the productive power of labor can be increased through investment and technological advancement. As we shall see (see 501–2 below), while such productive advance is an inherent tendency of capitalist production, Marxists do not, in general, see such increases in productivity as a practical possibility within the conditions of feudal agriculture. As a result, when the landlords wanted to increase their income, they had to do so at the expense of peasant living standards, by increasing rents, tallages, and other fines, or by imposing extra labor services (10:478).13 For Marx and Engels, feudalism and capitalism did not only differ in their dominant form of surplus labor (feudal rent versus capitalist surplusvalue) but also in the mechanism with which such surplus labor was appropriated by the propertied. Under capitalism, the wage laborer has been “freed” of any property in the means of production and of any ownership of products which he could sell in order to maintain himself. He is thus under an economic compulsion to sell his labor power—and thus also to perform surplus labor—so as to acquire the means of subsistence (28:176–77; 35:178–79, 704–6). Under feudalism, by contrast, Marx and Engels claimed that the peasant, the direct laborer, was “the ‘possessor’ of the means of production and labour conditions necessary for the production of his own means of subsistence” and so, unlike either the plantation slave or the proletarian, was in effect an independent producer in both agriculture and rural home industry (27:486; 37:776–77). When the peasant is performing necessary labor, he is thus working land “that is in practice his own”;14 similarly, when he is rendering surplus labor to his lord in the form of labor services on the lord’s demesne, he is “using instruments of labour (plough, cattle, etc.) which actually or legally belong to him” (37:668, 776; see also 24:308; 26:437– 38). It was this unity of the peasant producers with the means of production which was dissolved by the process of “primitive accumulation” which gave birth to capitalism. Here the peasant and artisan producers who were Rigby / Historical Materialism 481 the “proprietors” and “owners” of the means of their own subsistence were replaced by wage-workers whose only property is their capacity to labor. The “pygmy property of the many,” of the immediate producers, including “servile property,” was therefore concentrated into the large-scale property of the few (20:129; 24:199–200, 346; 25:256; 26:599; 28:391, 399, 413, 421–27, 431–36; 32:405; 34:257–58; 35:707; 37:265, 608, 799). If, as Marx argued, the peasant was an independent producer who possessed the means of providing his own subsistence, then unlike the propertyless wage laborer of capitalism, he was under no economic compulsion to perform surplus labor for his lord. In such conditions, the lord who is the “nominal owner of the land” can only obtain surplus labor from the producers “by other than economic pressure.” As a result, unlike the legally equal relationship between the buyers and sellers of labor-power under capitalism, the property relationship under feudalism “must simultaneously appear as a direct relation of lordship and servitude, so that the direct producer is not free” (28:423; 37:776–77). This approach has been extremely influential among modern Marxist characterizations of feudal class relations.15 Personal dependence rather than independent individuality thus formed “the groundwork” of medieval society (35:88) even if, as Engels pointed out, “in the Middle Ages there were innumerable degrees of bondage and serfdom,” unlike the more uniform systems characteristic of the so-called “Second Serfdom” of early modern Eastern Europe (46:404; see also 35:731). At times, Marx and Engels emphasized the insecurity and burdens faced by the unfree peasant who was “entirely at the mercy of his master” (10:409–10; 26:342–43; 24:453). Yet they also saw the peasant’s position as an independent producer, even one who was unfree, as providing him with a security and “guaranteed subsistence” which the free wage laborer, dependent on the vagaries of the labor market, did not enjoy (6:100–101, 344; 12:215; 20:415; 29:121; 35:706). Furthermore, the fact that under feudalism, as in all class societies, it is “in the interests of the ruling section of society to sanction the existing order as law” could also have the effect of restricting the extent of surplus labor. Anticipating modern historians, Marx stressed how such restrictions need not be “sanctioned as an explicit law” but can simply take the form of entrenched “custom and tradition.”16 In either case, the peasants acquire the possibility of accumulating their own property, which then allows the emergence of internal stratification among the peasantry (5:79; 24:367, 453; 37:779–82). Finally, Marx and Engels also stressed the extent to which the medieval peasant benefited from a share in common 482 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 resources such as pasture land and timber and from the existence of a strong village community with rights of self-administration (27:486–87; 37:777). Urban class structure: The guild system and merchant capital If feudal agriculture was the dominant form of production in the Middle Ages, Marx and Engels’s interest in the origins of the bourgeoisie meant that they also devoted much attention to the role of towns within medieval society. For Marx and Engels, the growth of the productive forces in human history was expressed in terms of historically specific forms of the social division of labor. They claimed that “the first” and “most important division of material and mental labour is the separation of town and country” (3:285; 5:32, 64; 6:179; 25:276–77; 38:97–98). While towns first arose in antiquity, Marx and Engels stressed that the urban decline of the late Roman period meant that medieval towns had then often to arise anew, these new towns being populated with “serfs who had become free.” A division of labor was thus established between town and country, as in Germany between the ninth and the twelfth centuries, as peasant craft production in self-sufficient village communities gave way to specialist urban industrial production (10:400; 38:98). The separation of town and country was then followed by “the separation of production and intercourse” with the formation of a “special class of merchants.” In turn, the “reciprocal action between production and intercourse” meant that the division of labor between town and country and within the individual town was joined by a division of labor between towns as each developed its own specialist branch of industry (5:33–34, 64– 67; 26:265; 35:707 n. 1). Nevertheless, there was still little specialization of labor within particular guilds or individual workshops. Unlike the deskilled workers of the early modern system of manufacturing who each specialized in a particular task: “every workman had to be versed in a whole round of tasks, had to be able to make everything that was to be made with his tool” (5:66; 6:184; 30:312, 316–17; 35:345–47, 364; 46:400). Marx and Engels identified three main classes within the medieval town: the master craftsmen; their journeymen, apprentices, and laborers; and the merchants. Their discussion of medieval urban industry is nearly always couched in terms of the “guild system,” of “guild production,” and of “guild relations” (24:308; 28:428; 33:9; 34:96–97), and so I will follow this terminology in explicating their views. By the “guild system,” Marx and Engels meant the relations between master craftsmen and their journeymen and apprentices, and the regulation of all these producers by an “indusRigby / Historical Materialism 483 trial corporation” (33:306). We have here a “limited” form of the relation between capital and wage labor. The master is “in possession of the conditions of production,” such as tools and raw materials, and is an employer of journeymen and apprentices: “to that extent he is a capitalist.” Yet “he is first and foremost a craftsman himself and is supposed to be a master of his craft.” The capital he employs is limited to buying the specific tools and raw materials needed for the particular craft of which he is a master: it is not yet capital in the abstract. His ability to become a capitalist employer is further limited by guild restrictions on the number of employees each master is permitted, restrictions which constrain the amount of surplus labor that he can appropriate. While medieval merchants did possess capital in an abstract form, they were prevented from becoming involved in production by guild exclusion and so could only circulate the goods produced by others (20:257; 28:428, 430; 30:187; 33:187; 34:25, 96–98, 103; 35:312–13, 364, 706–7). The “guild system” was thus a feudal form of industry which had to be swept away if capitalism was to develop. For Marx and Engels, medieval craft industry was also feudal in the sense that, like peasant agriculture, it was characterized by “the private property of the labourers in the means of production” since the instruments of labor were “adapted for the use of one worker” and so “belonged as a rule to the producer himself.” The producer owned both the raw materials and tools used in production as well as the final product of the labor process and used his own and family labor or, at most, the labor of apprentices and journeymen who themselves aspired to become master craftsmen. Wage labor here was exceptional and transitory, was complementary to the labor of the master craftsman and was often undertaken as life-cycle employment rather than as the work of a permanent wage-earning proletariat. As in agriculture, it was this unity of the industrial producers with their means of production which had to be overcome by the process of the primitive accumulation of capital. This process often first appeared in rural industry, which was beyond the reach of the restrictive practices of the urban guilds, as owners of capital undertook to “put out” raw materials to the producers, although even here the workers at first retained ownership of their own tools (5:65–66; 6:101; 10:407–8; 24:308–9; 25:255–58; 28:399, 423, 434–35; 30:270; 33:101; 35:364, 706, 738–39, 748–49; 37:332–34; 38:891–92; 46:400). Finally, just as Marx and Engels depicted peasant agriculture in terms of a self-sufficient “natural economy,” so their analysis of craft industry emphasized the importance of use-values rather than of exchange-values. Of course, they recognized that urban craftsmen “had from the first to pro484 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 duce for exchange”: the tailor could not eat a coat; the baker could not wear a loaf. Nevertheless, “the immediate, principal object of this production is not enrichment or exchange value as exchange value, but the subsistence of the producer as an artisan, as a master craftsman, i.e. use value” (25:259–60; 28:436). We thus have the simple circulation of commodities characteristic of petty commodity production in which the producer sells in order to buy for consumption and subsistence (Commodity-Money-Commodity: C-M-C) as opposed to buying in order to sell dear so as to accumulate (MC-M’) which is the goal of the capitalist mode of production (30:9–33; 35:157–66). Buying to sell dear was the aim of the other main class within urban society: the merchants who put to work the merchant capital which first originated in long-distance trade (29:232). At times, Marx and Engels insisted that capital is not simply money or things but rather that it is a particular form of social relation, that is, the relation between employers and free wage labor which follows the separation of the producers from the means of production (9:211; 26:194; 32:405, 35:180; 37:801; 49:179–80). Yet they also stressed that, in its original form of merchant’s capital, “capital” existed long before the emergence of a specifically capitalist mode of production and that its activities were compatible with a range of different relations of production (26:426; 32:464; 33:13; 37:323–24). Merchant’s capital, or capital used to buy cheap so as to profit by selling dear (M-C-M’), simply requires the existence of commodities and so is found even in those societies where the bulk of production is for immediate consumption rather than for exchange (6:113; 20:277; 26:557; 29:233, 480–81; 32:300, 491; 35:160, 180; 36:42, 121; 37:309, 321–27, 798, 887–90; 40:298). Merchant’s capital is indifferent as to whether these commodities are produced by slaves, guild artisans, free or unfree peasants, or wage laborers, since it is simply the task of merchant’s capital to circulate commodities rather than to enter into the realm of production itself, as does industrial capital. The Middle Ages possessed merchant’s capital but not industrial capital (28:436; 29:233, 252; 32:465–66; 33:13–15; 35:738; 36:115, 119, 157–58, 385; 37:323–29, 334). Merchant’s capital within medieval society also had its “twin brother”: usurer’s capital. Like merchant’s capital, usurer’s capital is found in a wide range of different societies; all it requires is the existence of money (which, in turn, requires the existence of trade) which can be lent to people of any class, including peasants and artisans who, unlike modern producers, tend to borrow to produce rather than to consume (37:588–91). It was this class of merchants and usurers who made up the ruling patriciate Rigby / Historical Materialism 485 of late medieval towns, a “comparatively small, privileged caste bound by family ties and common interests” which not only enriched itself by trade and money-lending but also profited by its control of town finances, appropriation of common rights, ability to impose tolls, and other imposts on the peasants and so on (10:406).17 Class struggle in town and country For Marx and Engels, the fact that the relations of production of medieval society were based on “exploitation” and “oppression” inevitably resulted in class conflict so that “all “ l past history” (original emphasis), at least after its primitive stages, “was the history of class struggles” (24:191–93; 25:26, 304, 307, 649 n. 27; 39:62–63). Marx and Engels realized that, as individuals, the members of any particular class are often engaged in hostile intraclass competition with one another: nobles for royal patronage, peasants for land, workers for employment. As a result, these individuals often come to see themselves as a class insofar as they “have to carry on a common battle against another class” (5:77, 80; 11:187). The opening words of the Communist Manifesto list the conflicts between “lord and serf, guild master and journeyman” as the medieval forms of these “uninterrupted, now hidden, now open” battles between the oppressed and oppressing classes (6:482). Attacking Max Stirner’s reference to the workers’ disturbances which “flare up here and there” in history, Marx and Engels insisted on the systemic nature of popular revolt in medieval and early modern society. Inevitably, they cited the well-known late medieval examples of revolt such as the French Jacquerie and the English peasants’ rising of 1381 (5:204). But they were also aware of the resistance by early medieval peasants to their lords’ attempts to enserf them, as in the revolt of the tenants of the archbishop of Rheims crushed by Charlemagne. The fixing of a definite limit for the obligations of the unfree in this early period “was obviously a consequence of the threatening attitude of the enthralled masses” (26:80–81). For Marx and Engels, it was the conflict between peasant and landlord which was the key social conflict of the medieval era: “the great risings of the Middle Ages all radiated from the country.”18 If recent Marxist-inspired historiography has emphasized the inherent conflicts within medieval urban society,19 Marx and Engels themselves argued that the day-laborers in the towns were merely an “unorganized rabble” who lacked social cohesion and that urban social conflict was further inhibited by the patriarchal relations of 486 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 the journeymen and apprentices with the guild masters and by the journeymen’s desire to become masters themselves which bound them to the existing social order (5:65–66). At times, Marx and Engels even belittled the social movements of the medieval countryside which, ultimately, “remained totally ineffective” because of the peasants’ “isolation and consequent crudity” (5:66; 7:520; 10:410, 444, 447, 454). One is reminded here of Marx’s famous reference in The Eighteenth Brumairee to the French peasants of the nineteenth century as possessing merely the unity of “potatoes in a sack” since, despite their shared economic position, interests, and culture, they lacked any effective means of self-organization (11:187). Yet, if Marx and Engels were aware of the obstacles faced by peasants in becoming a class “for itself,” they also recognized the various advantages possessed by medieval peasants in resisting their lords. In particular, the strong tradition of communal organization which, they believed, the Middle Ages inherited from the Germanic invaders of the Roman Empire and which endured “even under the harshest conditions of medieval serfdom,” provided the peasants with a source of local cohesion and a “means of resistance which neither the slaves of antiquity nor the modern proletariat found ready to hand.” When the landlords encroached on the rights of the peasant community they were confronted with “fierce” and “incessant” resistance (24:366, 444–46, 449; 26:58–59, 255). Thus, while he recognized that there was no single “general national peasant revolt” in Germany before 1525, Engels also stressed that there were “many local peasant insurrections” aimed against serfdom and against other feudal dues and restrictions and it was these movements which ultimately fused together in the great Peasants’ War of 1525 (10:410, 428–32, 437; 24:452). The immediate cause of these movements, as in 1525, was often the burden of taxation, a burden which fell particularly on the peasants. Nevertheless, once these revolts were in motion, other underlying issues often emerged. These included demands for an end to serfdom, feudal rents, corvée labor, and compulsory tithes; the abolition of lordly hunting privileges and “statute labour”; protection against arbitrary imprisonment and unjust treatment in the courts; and the right to elect and depose clergymen (10:402–3, 436, 446–47, 451, 475). If, at times, Engels disparaged the efforts of the “weak, dull-witted” peasants with their “infinite parochial bigotry and stubborn provincialism,” he also praised their “long and courageous resistance” against superior military opposition (10:459, 481). Similarly, much modern Marxist historical writing has been concerned to reject the “myth of the passive peasantry” and has stressed the willingness of medieval peasants to defend their interests against their lords, Rigby / Historical Materialism 487 even if such resistance most commonly took the form of local, piecemeal struggles rather than of dramatic national revolts.20 When we think of class conflict, we often think of struggles mounted from below in the form of rent strikes by the peasants or of popular revolts. Yet, Marx and Engels were also aware of conflicts which were launched from above: the landlord’s attempt to raise the level of rents is just as much an example of class conflict as his tenants’ attempts to resist him. One instance of such initiated by the propertied is that of the enserfment of free peasants in the confused conditions of late antiquity and early medieval Europe (26:250–54; 33:17). Another is that of the “Second Serfdom” where, from around 1450, the peasants east of the Elbe, who had originally been granted favorable terms of tenure so as to attract colonists, were enserfed, deprived of their existing rights, and forced to render extra dues and labor services (10:478–79; 24:451–53; 26:341–43; 46:400, 403–4). At times, Marx and Engels characterized class struggle as “the immediate motive force” of all history, from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the modern day. Class struggle was thus “the great driving force of historical progress” and the historical process was “a series of class struggles” (6:174; 27:478; 45:109, 408). Yet they themselves made little attempt to apply such claims to the history of the Middle Ages. As we shall see, their account of medieval social evolution (and, indeed, of social evolution in general) placed far more emphasis on the development of the forces of production as the motor of change within medieval society (see 493–98 below). Rather, it has been the work of more recent Marxists which has presented class struggle as the key to the divergent paths of development taken by particular European societies in the medieval and early modern periods and as the “prime mover” of the transition from feudalism to capitalism (see 510–11 below).21 Base and superstructure: The state If Marx’s 1859 “Preface” claims that society’s relations of production correspond to the level of development of its productive forces, then, in turn, it characterizes these relations as society’s economic “foundation” on which “arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness” (29:263). This is perhaps confusing metaphor given that, as we have seen, this so-called foundation (the relations of production) is itself built up on something even more fundamental (i.e., the productive forces), thus producing a three-tier model of social structure: productive forces, relations of production, and the political and ideologi488 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 cal superstructure (38:96). Nevertheless, Marx and Engels’s general point is clear: social structure can be seen in terms of a hierarchy of elements so that change within society’s economic foundation will inevitably lead “sooner or later, to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure” (5:329; 24:304; 26:391, 602; 29:263; 38:96). For Marx and Engels, the “correspondence” of any particular political superstructure (i.e., of the state) to its specific “economic basis” (25:26; 37:778) could take one of two main forms. In most cases, Marx and Engels conceived of the state in “instrumentalist” terms in which the state institutions provide the means by which “the most powerful, economically dominant class” within society “becomes also the politically dominant class and thus acquires new means of keeping down and exploiting the oppressed class.” Thus, in the Middle Ages, the state “was the organ of the nobility for keeping down the peasant serfs and villeins” and “political power was in conformity with the amount of land owned,” a view also adopted by modern Marxists in their account of the medieval English state (24:321; 25:137, 267; 26:271).22 Indeed, Engels even claimed that the influence of society’s relations of production on the state was more direct and unmediated in precapitalist modes of production than it was in modern society and that the medieval aristocracy, with its military and legal role, held power in an “exclusive way” which the modern bourgeoisie could not emulate (20:296; 26:391–92; 27:297). However, if in general the state is “the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests” (5:90, 180, 329; 6:147; 8:327), the nature of society’s class relations can, on occasion, produce a state which is relatively autonomous of the immediate wishes and interests of the economically dominant class. The classic example of this in Marx and Engels’s work is the absolutism of the early modern period in which the monarchy was able to hold the balance between the rising bourgeoisie, with whom it had been allied since the tenth century, and the declining feudal nobility and so, as “ostensible mediator” between the two classes, acquired “a certain degree of independence of both” (5:90, 92, 195, 361; 6:326–28; 26:271, 561).23 More generally, Marx and Engels argued that as a result of the division of labor between society’s rulingg class (the propertied) and its governingg class (those who personally exercised political power), the latter could acquire a “relative independence” from the former and so come to have interests of its own (14:53–54, 389; 49:59–60). Thus, even in the “earliest period of the Middle Ages,” the feudal lords “began to be replaced as Judges, by lawyers” who were required to have a knowledge of reading and writing Rigby / Historical Materialism 489 (12:103), while Marx and Engels were also aware of the grip on political and legal offices within the medieval state enjoyed by the clergy (10:410; 26:561). The result was a certain distance between the state and the feudal aristocracy, each of which had interests of its own. As a class, medieval landlords were unable to do without the feudal monarchy “which alone could protect them from outsiders and from one another.” Yet, as individuals, they found themselves engaged in an “incessant struggle” with the kings, who were themselves attempting to control their vassals (15:152; 26:560–61). It is this “relative autonomy of the medieval state” which has been emphasized by modern Marxists keen to reject the accusation that historical materialism is necessarily a form of economic reductionism.24 In general, however, Marx and Engels’s own stress was on the role of the state in maintaining “by force the conditions of existence and domination of the ruling class against the subject class” (25:137). Just as Marx and Engels offer a “functional explanation” of society’s relations of production in terms of their benefits for the development of the productive forces, so society’s ideological and political “superstructure” is explained in terms of its functionality for the reproduction of society’s economic “base.”25 Base and superstructure: Ideology Marx’s 1859 “Preface” claimed that society’s relations of production were not only the basis of the state but also provided the foundation for particular “forms of social consciousness,” such as legal, political, religious, artistic, and philosophical ideas: “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (29:263). Since the time of The German Ideology, Marx and Engels had attacked Hegelian and other idealist philosophical systems for inverting reality and for presenting history as always “under the sway of ideas” which unfolded in a logical progression (5:27, 61–62; 6:36, 170; 25:35, 89). Such idealists (or ideologists, as Marx and Engels called them, using the narrow sense of the term) failed to grasp the “real driving forces of history” which underlay the conscious motives of those who act out historical events (10:411–12; 25:389) and thus took “every epoch at its word,” believing “that everything it says and imagines about itself is true” (5:62, 74; 29:263).26 As an example of this idealist (or “ideological”) outlook, Marx cites Max Stirner’s reduction of the Middle Ages to Catholicism. For Stirner, “there exists only the history of religion and philosophy” so that the Middle Ages becomes a struggle around the concept of “hierarchy” and all the illusions of 490 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 the Middle Ages about itself are taken on trust, “in particular those illusions which the Emperor and the Pope brought to bear in their struggle against each other” (5:170–76; see also 5:327). If specific forms of social consciousness correspond to, “reflect,” or “echo” particular social circumstances (5:36), we would expect each class to have its own particular social outlook. However, Marx and Engels argued that the ruling class within each society tends to present “its interest as the common interest of all the members of society.” It therefore has to “give its ideas the form of universality, and present them as the only rational, universally valid ones” (5:60). Thus, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” and “the class which is the ruling materiall force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectuall force” (5:59, original emphasis; 6:503). In the Middle Ages, it was Christianity which was the ideology (in the broad sense of the word) which provided the justification for the existing social order. As Marx said, “the social principles of Christianity justified the slavery of antiquity (and) glorified the serfdom of the Middle Ages”; they preached “the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class,” offering to the latter only “the pious wish that the former may be charitable.” Human suffering and oppression are thus presented as “either a just punishment for original sin and other sins”27 or, alternatively, as “trials here which the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, ordains for the redeemed” (6:231).28 For Marx and Engels, as for modern Marxists such as Hilton, medieval religion thus functioned as a religious “veil” for feudal exploitation (6:487) and so, like all religions, presented society to itself “in idealised form” (28:464).29 Christianity therefore provides an instance of Marx and Engels’s claim that while “in all ideological domains” the raw material of belief is handed down by tradition, the changes which this material undergoes are the result of change in social relations. In itself, Christianity, just like any other body of ideas, “has no history whatsoever”; rather, there is only the “profane history” of the people who produce these ideas within the context of specific productive forces, relations of production, and class conflicts. Thus, Christian theology has provided an extremely elastic raw material which has taken many different specific forms and served many different social functions. The Christian religion arose in the ancient world, adapted to the new feudal society which emerged after the Germanic invasions, and finally, with its “cultuss of abstract man,” became in its Protestant variant the most fitting form of religion for the social relations of emerging capitalism. Each of these changing forms of religious consciousness was thus the product of “a definite form of society” (5:92, 154; 6:165–66, 169–70, 503; 10:244; Rigby / Historical Materialism 491 21:93–94; 23:379; 24:191–93, 304; 25:86, 254; 26:376, 394–96; 29:262; 31:182; 35:90; 38:100; 39:333–34; 49:8). However, if “the religious world is but the reflex of the real world” (35:90), this did not mean that Christianity was “simply an idea” in people’s heads. Rather, this idea received powerful institutional expression in the form of the medieval Church which was itself the wealthiest feudal landlord with an organization which was structured along “feudal and hierarchical lines.” The clerical estate was thus the “bearer of medieval feudal ideology” which provided a legitimation of contemporary feudal inequality (10:271–72, 404, 412–13; 26:597; 27:289).30 Although they saw Christianity as an ideological prop of the social order of medieval Europe, Marx and Engels were highly critical of a shallow rationalism which saw religion simply in terms of ignorant superstition (27:449) or as a form of self-interested deception. A religion that dominated much of civilized humanity for 1,800 years “cannot be disposed of merely by declaring it to be nonsense gleaned together by deceivers.” Rather the real task facing historians is to explain its origins and development “from the historical conditions under which it arose and reached its dominating position” and, in particular, in terms of the needs of the people of the time (24:427–30; see also 2:66, 132–36; 3:461–64). Yet, in practice, Marx and Engels themselves made little attempt to specify the particular social needs met by orthodox medieval Christianity (24:433–35; 46:256), even though more recent historians have risen to this challenge.31 Engels did, however, offer a more detailed account of medieval heresyy in terms of the needs of the specific social groups to which it appealed. For Engels, all ideology in the Middle Ages took the form of religion and theology, and it was Catholicism that provided the “most general sanction of the existing feudal order.” As a result, all attacks on feudalism necessarily took the form of theological heresies: “The existing social relations had to be stripped of their halo of sanctity before they could be attacked” (10:412–13; 24:434; 26:376, 395, 598; 27:290).32 The elasticity of Christian thought meant that it functioned not only as an ideological legitimation of the feudal order but also, from the twelfth century onwards, that it could be adapted so as to provide the basis for radical attacks on, and to construct utopian alternatives to, the existing feudal social order.33 Engels divided medieval heresy into three main forms (10:413–15). First, there was heresy which was a means of resistance to the encroachment of feudalism on primitive communal and patriarchal relations, as in the case of Waldensianism of the Alpine shepherds. Secondly, there were the “town heresies” of the burghers (although they also drew support from the lower nobility) which were 492 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 primarily an attack on the wealth and power of the clergy and called for an église é à bon marchéé through the abolition of “all the expensive elements of the church” such as monks, prelates, and the papal court. The followers of Arnold of Brescia in Italy and Germany, the Albigensians in southern France, John Wycliffe in England, and Hus and the Calixtines in Bohemia, who, like all reforming religious movements, presented themselves as the expression of a desire to “return to what was old and simple” (39:327), are examples of this tendency.34 Finally, there were the heresies “that lent direct expression to peasant and plebeian needs.” These shared with the “burgher heresies” an anticlericalism and a desire for a return to the simplicity of the early Church but, nevertheless, went “infinitely further” in their demands. Here heresy was not just an attack on the dogmas and institutions of the Church but became an attack on feudal society per se with a belief in the “equality of the children of God” providing the justification for demands for civil equality along with “abolition of statute labour, quitrents, taxes, privileges, and at least the most crying differences in property.” Thus alongside the burgher heresies such as the Wycliffites and the Calixtines, there were the followers of John Ball in England and the Taborites in Bohemia.35 For such movements, chiliasm often provided a “violent and fantastic” vision of the future (10:413–15). Nevertheless, behind the “mask” of religious exaltation, these movements gave expression to “extremely tangible worldly interests” (27:448). Similarly, in the Reformation itself, Catholicism, Lutheranism and Thomas Müntzer’s revolutionary chiliasm were all rooted in the “social conditions of life” of particular classes in society (10:411–12, 415–16; 21:93–94; 26:395–96). The productive forces and social change For Marx and Engels, human history was a process involving “constant motion, change, transformation (and) development” (6:166, 192; 25:24, 168; 35:20; 37:713). What, then, did they identify as the particular factors promoting change within medieval society? As in their account of social structure, Marx and Engels granted a primacy to the productive forces in their explanation of social change. They presented the development of the productive forces, that is, the growing productivity of human labor, as an inherent tendency within human history (Cohen’s “Development Thesis”)36 and argued that it was this inexorable development which constituted the basis of change in society’s relations of production. As Marx says in Wage Labour and Capital, l “the social relations of production change, are transRigby / Historical Materialism 493 formed, with the change and development of the material means of production, the productive forces.” Thus ancient, feudal and bourgeois society each correspond to “a particular stage of development” of the productive forces and of mankind (9:211–12). That “there is a continual movement of growth in productive forces,” a growth which forces men to change their social relations (6:166), is never justified at length by Marx and Engels but rather was assumed as a given of their analysis.37 Yet it was this assumption which was to provide the basis of their account of social change. As the 1859 “Preface” says, “at a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production.” From being “forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution” (29:263; see also 5:74). It was this model of society’s developing productive forces coming into conflict with the existing relations of production which underpinned Marx and Engels’s account of the end of the Middle Ages and of the transition from feudalism to capitalism between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. For Marx and Engels, the capitalistic era essentially “dates from the sixteenth century” (27:366; 34:327–28; 35:157, 706–7, 738; 40:346–47; 47:179). They were therefore obliged to show that the emergence of capitalist relations of production in this period was rooted in the productive advances of the medieval era and that, in particular, the later Middle Ages was a period of rising towns, trade and industry, and of “enormous technical advances” (24:452; 26:371). As a result, society’s productive forces outgrew the existing relations of production which, in the form of feudal landed property, guilds, and monopolies, had become a brake on further productive advance (6:175; 6:322, 348–49; 25:152; 26:390; 35:738–39; 38:96–98). Although Marx and Engels saw agriculture as the dominant branch of production within feudal society, in practice, much of their analysis of the new productive forces whose growth underlay the transition to capitalism focuses on the spheres of towns, trade, and industry. It was from the burgesses of the medieval towns that “the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed” and a form of “capital independent of landed property” appeared (5:64; 6:485): “the capitalist mode of production appears later in agriculture than in industry” (32:100; 37:785). Thus while Marx and Engels warned against the tendency to overrate the volume and importance of trade in the Middle Ages (37:331 n. 49), they still claimed that it was the rise of money, industry, and commodity production which “by the end of the fifteenth century” had dissolved the natural economy of feudalism from within (5:64, 494 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 67–68, 90; 6:530–31; 24:192; 25:96–97, 152; 26:556–58, 597). That the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed a “vast expansion” of trade and industry could, Engels claimed, be seen from the “gold famine” of the period as the economy outgrew the existing supplies of bullion, a gold famine which drove the Portuguese to Africa and which eventually resulted in the discovery of America (49:58; 26:558). As Marx said, all precapitalist societies were destroyed by the development of wealth or “which is the same thing, by the development of the social productive forces.” Thus feudal society “was destroyed by urban industry, trade and modern agriculture” and even by particular inventions such as the compass, gunpowder, and the printing press (25:144; 28:464; 33:403; 40:450). This growth of commercialism eventually meant that “the feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, no longer sufficed” and the manufacturing system, with its division of labor within each workshop, had to replace the medieval system of division of labor between guilds (5:67–68; 6:485). In industry and in agriculture, “the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder” (6:489). Thus, despite Marx and Engels’s explicit claims for the primacy of production over trade and exchange in human history (5:32; 49:58), in practice, their actual analysis of the transition to capitalism tends to present trade itself as the dynamic force for change, an approach most famously developed amongst modern Marxists by Paul Sweezy.38 Rather than showing how productive advance causes a development in the division of labor, Marx and Engels’s analysis seems to demonstrate that the development of the division of labor within society is itself the cause of productive advance and that, in true Smithian fashion, the division of labor is determined by the extent of the market.39 It is, therefore, the growth of demand which exposes the guild organization of industry as an obstacle to productive advance. Thus, while the bourgeoisie developed in the Middle Ages with the rise of urban industry and commerce, it was only “with the discovery of the extra-European lands, from the middle of the fifteenth century onwards” that the bourgeoisie “acquired a far more extensive sphere of trade and therewith a new spur for its industry” (24:192; 25:96–97). It was the rising demand created by this expansion of trade and the growing division of labor between town and country, between different countries and between individual towns which caused industry to outgrow guild production and to cast off the feudal social relations which had become obstacles Rigby / Historical Materialism 495 to productive advance (5:67–68, 90–91; 6:185, 322, 348–49, 485; 25:260; 32:466, 531; 35:432–33; 38:98). Yet, despite this Smithian emphasis on the disintegrating effects of the growth of the rise of towns and the growth of trade on feudal relations of production,40 Marx and Engels’s later works repeatedly stressed how, in themselves, trade, money, and commodities were nott enough to explain the transition to capitalism. Monetary wealth iss one of the forces which accelerates the dissolution of feudalism since “all development of merchant’s capital tends to give production more and more the character of production for exchange value and to turn products more and more into commodities.” Nevertheless, while commodity production is a necessary precondition of capitalism, “the mere existence of monetary wealth, even its conquest of a sort of supremacy” is not, in itself, sufficient for the appearance of capitalism, “otherwise Rome, Byzantium etc., would have concluded their history with free wage labour and capital.” Its dissolving effect “depends upon the nature of the producing communities” in which trade arises, not just on the existence of trade per se. In the ancient world, the growth of trade led to slavery; in the modern world it led to capitalism. Merchant’s capital was crucial for the rise of capitalism, but it could only play this role where particular social conditions had emerged which “had taken shape within the Middle Ages,” a point which Marxist critics of Sweezy’s “neo-Smithian” approach have been keen to emphasize (28:429–32; 29:59–60, 252–53; 30:39; 37:321–32, 330, 335, 588, 592; 47:179–80).41 What, then, were the conditions that allowed merchant’s capital to take over production and so to develop into specifically capitalist relations of production (29:233)? Marx and Engels’s answer to this question stresses the need for the producers to have been detached from possession of the means of production and thus of their own subsistence, so that they are no longer tied to the soil or bound by guild regulations; in other words, for labor power to have become a commodity. In particular, they stressed the importance of the growth of vagabondage for the eventual emergence of a wage-earning proletariat, a trend which they believed was first encountered in the thirteenth century but which only became “general and permanent” in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries when “a mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market” (5:69; 6:185; 25:191; 28:428–29; 35:705–9, 723–31). But why had these producers been stripped of the means of production so that labor power had emerged as a commodity? Marx and Engels’s answer to this question seems to be based on a variety of contingent historical factors which, although perfectly legitimate in themselves, tend 496 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 to undermine their own emphasis on history as a coherent process based upon the growth of the productive forces. A classic instance of this is their repeated stress on the importance of the lords’ disbanding of their liveried feudal retinues for the growth of vagrancy and the availability of free labor (5:68–69; 6:185; 24:311; 25:258; 28:426, 431; 29:153; 35:708–9).42 Insofar as such disparate factors aree incorporated by Marx and Engels into a wider explanatory framework based on the growth of the productive forces, they tend, once more, to be linked to the rise of trade, money, and commodities. Hence Marx’s claim that it was the rise of monetary wealth and merchant’s capital which made the feudal lord aware of the exchange-value of his produce and so led him “to exchange his corn, cattle etc., for imported use values, instead of squandering his own production with his retainers, and measuring his wealth largely by their number” (28:431–32). Similarly, “the transformation of arable land into sheepwalks” in England in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, which Marx believed was crucial for “the forcible driving of the peasantry from the land” and the creation of a proletariat, was the result (he wrongly claimed) of “the rapid rise of the Flemish wool manufactures” and the corresponding rise in wool prices in England, that is, of the growth of international trade and of industry (5:69; 6:185; 29:121, 153; 32:100, 785, 788; 35:709–11). This tendency to fall back onto the rise of trade as a prime mover of the dissolution of feudalism is most apparent in Marx and Engels’s account of the rise of feudal rent in the form of money. As we have seen, in certain respects, Marx and Engels regarded money rent as simply a change in form of rent in kind. Yet they also claimed that money rent is the “final” and “dissolving” form of feudal ground rent whose appearance means that “the character of the entire mode of production is thus more or less changed.” “In its further development money rent must lead—aside from all intermediate forms, e.g., the small peasant tenant farmer—either to the transformation of land into peasants’ freehold, or to the form corresponding to the capitalist mode of production, that is to rent paid by a capitalist tenant farmer.” The development of money rents is also linked to the rise of a land market and the accumulation of land in the hands of capitalist, leasehold farmers who produce for the market using hired labor. All of these developments presuppose “a considerable development of commerce, of urban industry, of commodity production in general, and thereby of money circulation” (6:344; 24:558; 37:783–88, 792–93). For Marx and Engels, all of these economic trends were embodied in the rise of a middle class whose interests were opposed to those of the feudal aristocracy which it was eventually to overthrow and, in Rigby / Historical Materialism 497 so doing, to cast off its “own feudal mode of existence.””43 It was this rise of the urban middle class that explained the Renaissance, heresy, the Reformation, the rise of science, the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and so on (5:90, 92, 195, 343, 361; 6:78, 211, 326–28, 332, 337, 486; 24:415; 26:271, 393, 395, 561; 27:289–95). Marxism and medieval society: An assessment The strengths of the Marxist tradition Inevitably, given that they were writing more than a century ago, many of Marx and Engels’s specific empirical claims about medieval Europe now seem outdated or inaccurate.44 What is important for our purposes here, however, is not to demonstrate Marx and Engels’s inaccuracies about matters of historical fact but rather to establish to what extent such errors are symptomatic of more general problems within historical materialism. It is not where Marx and Engels happened to go wrong that is important but rather where they hadd to go wrong because of their wider social and historical theory. What, then, are the strengths and weaknesses of their approach to medieval society? That the historical materialist account of medieval social structure and historical change has many strengths is evident from the profound influence which Marx and Engels’s work has had on the modern study of the Middle Ages. For instance, in my own field of medieval English history, it is impossible, whatever one’s politics, not to admire the contribution of Marxist scholars such as Hilton, Brenner, E. A. Kosminsky, and Zvi Razi. There are many historians, such as Chris Dyer, who would not label themselves as Marxist in political terms but whose important work is certainly historical materialist in inspiration.45 In addition to these historians, a wide variety of Marxist theoreticians, such as Middleton on the peasant family or Corrigan and Sayer on the state, have offered stimulating historical materialist interpretations of medieval English society.46 Similarly, while Marx and Engels themselves had little to say about the secular culture of the Middle Ages (apart from Engels’s passing references to the medieval cult of adulterous courtly love [26:177–87, 184–85, 187]), Marxism has been an important influence on the approach to Middle English literature developed in the work of writers such as David Aers, Sheila Delany, Britton J. Harwood, Peggy Knapp, and Stephen Knight.47 Adopting Marx’s claim that specific forms of art, literature, and intellectual production are “bound up with certain forms of social development” (28:47; 31:182), these scholars 498 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 have attempted to show how medieval literary works reproduce—and disrupt—the dominant ideology of the day. Similarly, Hilton’s account of the social appeal of the medieval ballads of Robin Hood develops Marx and Engels’s suggestion that, in the Middle Ages, as in other societies, pleasure itself was socially specific: “each estate had its own distinct forms of pleasure and its distinct manner of enjoyment” (5:417–19).48 At a time when historical studies are becoming ever more specialized, the Marxist approach provides historians with a useful reminder of the need to see each aspect of society as part of a larger totality, a totality which is necessarily in motion as a result of its inherent stresses, strains, and conflicts. Marxist historians thus tend to ask the interesting questions, even if we do not always agree with their answers. Besides, when Marxist historians such as Chris Wickham and Guy Bois can differ by centuries in their dating of the transition from the ancient to the feudal mode of production, it is apparent that there is no single set of orthodox Marxist answers with which we have to agree or disagree.49 If these are the strengths of the Marxist tradition, what are the main weaknesses of Marxist approaches to medieval society? The primacy of the productive forces Of all of Marx and Engels’s claims, the least acceptable aspect of their social theory now is probably their “Primacy Thesis,” in which society’s relations of production correspond to the level of development of its productive forces (see 473–75 above), and so are cast aside as they become fetters on the growth of the productive forces (see 493–94 above). Indeed, modern Marxists, never inclined to ascribe to Marx a view which they themselves cannot accept, have even been tempted to reject this account of historical materialism as a valid reading of Marx’s work and tend to stress instead the primacy of society’s relations of production over its productive forces.50 Even if we take Marx’s aphoristic claim that “the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist” (6:165–66) as less than the literal truth, we can still see it as symptomatic of all of the weaknesses of his and Engels’s claims for the social primacy of the productive forces. After all, as Marx was well aware, hand-mills existed long before feudalism (29:213), which suggests that a given level of the productive forces can be compatible with a variety of different relations of production. Moreover, while it is a tautology to say that industrial capitalism requires the existence of large-scale industry, such as steam-mills, Marx himself went out of Rigby / Historical Materialism 499 his way to deny that industrial technology gave us capitalism per se. On the contrary, Marx and Engels repeatedly insisted that capitalism had emerged beforee the rise of large-scale industry and that, on its first appearance, capitalism takes under its control “the specific actual labour processes as it finds them available in the existing technology and in the form in which they developed on the basis of non-capitalist relations of production” (20:258; 30:92; 34:95–96, 102–3; 35:314, 326–27).51 The emphasis here is not on the dynamic productive forces bringing about change in society’s class relations but rather on change in the relations of production as the precondition of change in society’s productive forces. If, as Marx and Engels claimed, society’s relations of production correspond to and change with the level of development of its productive forces, then we would expect that, as they themselves concluded, “serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture” (5:38). Yet, in his specific historical analysis of the transition to capitalism, Marx actually claims the opposite: at first, “agriculture remains the same although the day labourer has replaced the serf” (34:102–3). For Marx, England underwent an “agricultural revolution” from the “last third of the fifteenth century” until the final decade of the sixteenth century (25:732). Yet, while this revolution in the productive forces took place in the sixteenth century, serfdom had, in fact, “practically disappeared” in England as early as the “last part of the fourteenth century” so that the “immense majority of the population consisted then, and to a still larger extent in the fifteenth century, of free peasant proprietors” (35:707–8; see also 10:443; 28:433). Again, Marx’s own historical analysis concentrates on change in society’s social relations as the prelude to change in its productive forces, the opposite approach to that set out in his and Engels’s general theory. Insofar as Marx’s analysis of the transition to capitalism was based on the development of the productive forces, it tended to focus, as we saw above (see 494–98), on the unilinear rise of towns and trade, in the later Middle Ages as a necessary prelude to the transition to capitalism which occurred from the sixteenth century onwards. Indeed, seeing the late medieval economy in terms of the rise of a “new world” of money, trade, and economicc individualism which was embodied in an emerging commercial middle class remains a popular approach among materialist literary critics eager to seek a social context for works such as Chaucer’s late-fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales.52 Yet, in fact, the trend toward the commercialization and urbanization of medieval society seems stronger for the period between around 1000 and 1300 than for the later Middle Ages. “Within the terms of 500 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 Marx’s own ideas, the emphasis that has long been placed upon the late Middle Ages as a period of transition from feudalism to capitalism lacks adequate foundations, and seriously misrepresents the magnitude of earlier change.”53 Moreover, the model of developing productive forces calling forth new relations of production is certainly not employed in Marx and Engels’s own analysis of the originss of feudalism in the age of the Germanic invasions. On the contrary, they believed that feudalism emerged in an epoch of “universal impoverishment; decline of commerce, handicrafts, the arts and of the population; decay of the towns; [and] retrogression of agriculture to a lower stage” (5:34, 85; 26:248–49), a claim which has more recently been developed in the work of Dockès.54 Furthermore, while Engels argued that the relations of production of late antiquity corresponded to the level of its (declining) productive forces, he also believed that, in the next four hundred years until the time of Charlemagne, levels of production in agriculture and industry “had not sunk or risen to any material extent” (26:253–54). Thus, while Marx and Engels explicitly identified an overall coherence in human history based on the growth of the productive forces, their own analyses of particular historical periods showed how, in any individual epoch, the productive forces could advance, regress, or stagnate, and that each of these trends required a historically specific explanation. Of these two approaches, it is the latter which seems more useful to historians. Certainly, rather than stressing how dynamic productive forces call forth new social relations, modern Marxist historians themselves are much more likely to ask why specific societies produce particular forms and paces of development of the productive forces and why certain societies encourage productive development while others put huge obstacles in its way.55 For Marx and Engels, where the productive forces do possess an inherent tendency to develop is within the particular conditions of the capitalist mode of production: whereas capitalist relations of production create a “constant revolutionising” of the productive forces, all earlier modes of production are “essentially conservative” (6:487; 28:463–65; 35:489; see also 12:127; 25:137; 39:346–47). Marx and Engels specified a number of reasons why the productive forces of medieval society lacked an inherent dynamic of development. For instance, the feudal economy’s orientation toward the production and consumption of use-values meant that it lacked the thrust to development characteristic of capitalism with its limitless production and accumulation of exchange-value which necessarily overturn the “old, peaceful, stable condition of things” (25:260; 28:426, 465; 29:469–70). Similarly, the “infinite fragmentation of means of production” and isolation of Rigby / Historical Materialism 501 individual peasant producers meant that they could not benefit from new social forms of labor, from the concentration of capital, or the application of science and resulted in a “monstrous waste of human energy” (37:793–94). The small scale of production of both handicraft artisans and peasants also hindered the accumulation of capital. These producers were also constrained by the regulation of the Mark and the guild community (25:259–60) and perhaps exercised a preference for leisure and the maintenance of a certain level of consumption over ceaseless accumulation (28:251, 430). Where the lords received rents in labor or in kind, that is, where use-values rather than exchange-values predominated, there was “no boundless thirst for surplus labour” on their part (35:243–44). Moreover, they preferred to consume their surpluses in the form of large retinues and so on— they were essentially political animals rather than economic maximizers (3:266–69; 35:708)— unlike the employers of modern capitalism whose competition on the market forces them to invest and to innovate. Certainly, modern Marxists have stressed how it was the barriers which feudalism placed in the way of productive investment and its inabilityy to develop the productive forces which underlay the Malthusian crisis of declining per capita productivity and falling living standards of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Similarly, in explaining the divergent paths taken by particular European societies in the late medieval and early modern period, it is now change in society’s relations of production and the role of class struggle which have pride of place rather than some supposed universal tendency of society’s productive forces to develop.56 Finally, this recognition of society’s relations of production as determinants of the particular form and pace of development of productivity has led a number of Marxists to advance a general model of historical change which is explicitly at odds with Marx and Engels’s claims for the historical primacy of society’s developing productive forces. As Perry Anderson put it: contrary to widely received beliefs amongst Marxists, the characteristic “figure” of a crisis in a mode of production is not one in which vigorous (economic) forces burst triumphantly through retrograde (social) relations and promptly establish a higher productivity and society on their ruins. On the contrary, forces of production typically stall and recede within the existing relations of production; these then must first themselves be radically changed and reordered beforee new productive forces can be created. . . . In other words, the relations of production generally 502 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 change priorr to the forces of production in the epoch of transition and not vice versa.57 Isaac Johsua agreed: “le changement des rapports de production précède et commande celui des forces productives.”58 Dockès’s study of the development of new productive forces in the Middle Ages in the form of the watermill led to the same conclusion: “technological progress was a byproduct of social struggles, and the form that progress took was determined by social relations.”59 We are thus confronted with two different versions of historical materialism: one stresses the historical primacy of society’s developing productive forces; the other focuses on its relations of production as producing different forms and paces of development of the productive forces.60 Our task, then, is not to decide for or against Marxism but rather to decide whichh of the conflicting Marxist approaches on offer to us is the most fruitful for historical research. Estates and nonclass forms of inequality If Marx and Engels’s claims for the “correspondence” of society’s relations of production to the level of development of its productive forces are problematic, then so too are a number of aspects of their characterization of medieval social relations. One common criticism of Marx and Engels’s account of society in terms of economic classes is that while this model may have been appropriate for the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, it cannot be applied to preindustrial societies which consisted of status-groups which were ranked by the esteem granted to their social functions, functions which “may have no connection at all with the production of material goods.”61 In a sense, it is rather ironic that Marx and Engels should be criticized in this way given, as we have seen, that they themselves clearly distinguished the “estates” of medieval society from the classes of modern capitalism (see 475–76 above). Nevertheless, despite Marx and Engels’s recognition of the existence of estates within medieval society, it would still be true to say that they never theorizedd how social stratification in terms of estates and estate privileges were related to society’s class relations and property rights.62 In practice, Marx and Engels tended to subsume the existence of estates into a class analysis so that, for instance, the prelates of the medieval church were presented primarily as feudal landlords involved in a class relation with their tenants (10:404; 24:450; 27:289; 35:246). A similar tendency to minimize Rigby / Historical Materialism 503 the differences between lay and ecclesiastical landlords can also be found in the work of modern Marxist-inspired accounts of medieval society.63 Even if medieval preachers divided society into those who worked, those who prayed, and those who fought in order to legitimate feudal inequality, this does not mean that estate distinctions within medieval society were merely “figments of the imagination.”64 On the contrary, the clergy can be seen as the members of a separate social “systact” (a group sharing a common endowment [or lack] of economic, political, or ideological power) whose enjoyment of a particular form of exclusionary social “closure” gave them estate-specific forms of access to wealth, status, and power.65 We can generalize this point further to say that while historical materialism provides an extremely useful analysis of society’s class divisions, it tends to neglect other, nonclass social inequalities and conflicts, such as those based on racial or religious divisions (as in the case of the position of the Jews within medieval society) or on other forms of personal status. A classic example of such a nonclass social inequality which is central to the stratification of all societies is that of gender. While Engels rightly emphasized that the nature and extent of the inequality between the sexes is socially specific and historically changing rather than being biological and inevitable in nature (26:141, 165, 182–83), his explanation of patriarchy in terms of its links with the transhistorical category of “private property” meant that, like Marx, he provided no real account of how gender inequalities were related to specific forms of class relation. Modern Marxists’ attempts to fill this gap in Marx and Engels’s analysis have tended to result either in reductionism, as when medieval gender inequalities are (rather unconvincingly) explained in terms of their functional benefits for feudal relations of production, or, alternatively, in an attractive but seemingly non-Marxist sociological pluralism in which society is seen in terms of a multiplicity of separate axes of social inequality.66 Agrarian class structure: Peasant possession of the productive forces Even in its own terms, Marx and Engels’s account of rural class relations in the Middle Ages is open to criticism. One problem is their reliance on the notion of the peasants as the “possessors” of the means of their own subsistence who were “exploited” by their landlords (see 477–83 above). This view of the peasants as the “possessors” of the means of production under feudalism derives from two main sources. The first was an explicit equation 504 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 of the peasant producers of the countryside with the independent artisans of the towns who, as Marx and Engels rightly pointed out, didd own their own instruments of labor (25:255–56). The second source of this emphasis on the peasants’ possession of the means of production is Marx and Engels’s tendency to arrive at the differences between medieval and modern society by deducingg these differences from a series of binary oppositions: universal rights versus hereditary estate privileges, free competition versus guild restriction, and so on (2:364–65; 8:161, 326–27, 335; 20:77; 25:97–98, 151–52; 28:37, 433; 29:233; 35:88). Similarly, since capitalism was characterized by the separation of the producers from the means of subsistence, it followed that precapitalist modes must have been characterized by its opposite, that is, by the producers’ possession of the means of production. Yet, the fact that, when Marx describes the serf as the possessor of “the means of production and labour conditions necessary for the production of his own means of subsistence,” he puts the word possessorr in inverted commas (37:776) suggests that this possession is, in reality, somewhat problematic.67 Certainly, Marx and Engels’s own analysis of the peasants’ possession of land tends to pull in two contradictory directions. Thus, while in volume 3 of Capitall Marx refers to the land and instruments of labor under feudalism as “in fact or legally, the property of the tiller himself” rather than of the “nominal owner of the land” (37:668, 776–77), he also stresses how in these circumstances “the direct producer is not the owner, but only a possessor” of the means of production (37:779). Rather than simply emphasizing the “possession” of the means of production enjoyed by the producers under feudalism, Marx and Engels actually claim that in all modes of production the existence of surplus labor is dependent upon a “monopoly of the means of production” by the propertied class (26:193; 35:243–44). Under feudalism, where agriculture is the chief branch of production, this monopoly takes the form of landed property—“the monopoly by certain persons over definite portions of the globe, as exclusive spheres of their private will to the exclusion of others” (37:609–11, 627–28, 770). In such conditions, the peasant, although an “independent producer,” is no longer an independent proprietor but merely a tenant who has possession of land “on condition of performing services and paying dues” (6:100, 344; 24:450; 26:253, 487; 34:96). However, if this is the case, rather than theorizing precapitalist relations of production in terms of the producers’ possession or even ownership of the means of production, property rights in all modes of production would seem to be most usefully conceptualized in terms of a variety of forms of access to and exclusion from the means of production.68 In the feudal Rigby / Historical Materialism 505 mode of production, agrarian class relations are based on the lords’ monopoly of land, their ability to exclude others from access to it, and the resulting conditionall possession of the land by the peasant producers in return for rent. But in this case, we can no longer see the peasants’ payment of rent as necessarily being the product of extraeconomic coercion which results from their supposed “possession” of the means of production. All that is required for the payment of rent, as Marx realized, is a legal framework that protects the landlords’ property rights (37:781). We would then need a historically specific explanation of why lord/peasant relations took the form of serfdom in particular times and places (involving factors such as the land/labor ratio, the role of the state, the strength of the peasant community, shifts in demand for grain, etc.) rather than seeing servility as a constitutive or defining feature of feudal relations between landlords and peasants per se.69 Of course, if we so wish, we can reserve the word feudalism for those forms of lord/peasant relation characterized by extraeconomic coercion. All that follows is that we would then need some other term for lord/peasant relations in general. Agrarian class structure: Exploitation A further conceptual problem with Marx and Engels’s account of feudal class relations is its reliance on the concept of “exploitation” (see 477–83 above). For Marx and Engels, exploitation exists objectively. Indeed, its extent can even be expressed in mathematical terms (35:227–30, 531–34). As we have seen, they regarded serfdom as exploitative in the sense that the rent paid to the lord by the peasant represents “unpaid” or “gratuitous” surplus labor for which “no equivalent is returned” (20:132–33; 36:384–85; 37:783, 789). Yet, far from there being “no equivalent” returned for rent, Marx and Engels themselves note that serfdom often arose in the chaotic conditions of invasion, violence, and the breakdown of central political power, conditions in which free peasants surrendered their holdings to a powerful patron in order to obtain the benefits of his protection (26:250, 252–53, 450).70 Even more simply, as we have seen, medieval peasants paid rent in order to gain the beneficial “equivalent” of enjoying access to the land owned by the landlords. In this case, the cost of paying rent to acquire land would not constitute “surplus labor” but could be seen as part of the “necessary” labor which the peasants had to perform in order to acquire the means of their own subsistence. In practice, whether or not we regard the payment of rent for land as “exploitative” is likely to depend upon whether or not we accept private property rights as legitimate. For instance, those who accepted the legiti506 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 macy of private property rights would also accept the landlords’ right to demand rent for the use of their land. In this perspective, the payment of rent might seem exploitative only when, as seems to have been the case in late-eleventh-century England, peasants were coerced to pay rents that were above the market level. However, by the late thirteenth century, the tendency noted by Marx for feudal rents to become fixed by custom meant that, because of a century of inflation, villein rents were often below w the economic 71 level. Paradoxically, if one accepted the legitimacy of private property rights, one could say that it was the peasants who “exploited” their landlords in the sense that their customary conditions of tenure prevented their lords from obtaining the full economic return from their landed property. In other words, far from exploitation having an objective existence which can be measured mathematically, the perception—or, it should also be stressed, the denial—of its existence is dependent upon our own subjective moral and political judgments. For this reason, while it is perfectly possible to continue to study medieval society with the help of Marxist concepts—in terms of its characteristic classes, their property rights, forms of income, and so on—it may be useful to abandon the notion of “exploitation” as an analytical tool (even though it may remain crucial for our own moral and political values). What is important is not whether wee see feudalism as exploitative but whether or not medieval peasants regarded it as such—and, if they did, whether they possessed the means of local or national resistance to do anything about it. Urban class structure: The guild system Marx and Engels’s analysis of urban social relations (see 483–86 above) is perhaps less controversial than their account of feudal agriculture. Where their analysis now seems most problematic is in their description of medieval handicraft production as the “guild system.” After all, Marx and Engels themselves were well aware that not all medieval artisans were organized in guilds (32:534) and that the rise of urban craft industry predated the appearance of “guilds, livery companies [and] mysteries” (33:406). But, in this case, it would be unwise to equate the “guild system” with other systems of production such as putting out or the factory system. Systems of apprenticeship were certainly possible without guilds and, in any case, apprenticeship was an exception within medieval industry. Many craftsmen seem to have felt no need for a formal guild structure and most medieval towns were so small that they did not possess the number of artisans in any particular Rigby / Historical Materialism 507 occupation which was needed to support guild organizations. The small size of most urban workshops thus resulted not from guild restrictions on the number of employees but simply reflected the fact that artisan production was labor- rather than capital-intensive (35:726–27), which meant that it was relatively easy for journeymen to create new units of production by setting up as masters in their own right. Finally, while Marx and Engels presented craft guilds as an urban expression of the egalitarianism inherited from the early Germanic Mark community (24:448–49; 26:58; 37:888), guilds often seem to have developed in response to pressure from above, from royal and municipal government (for an example, see 33:406), and were actually more common in the later Middle Ages when economic recession promoted policies of restriction and protectionism.72 Base and superstructure: Interpenetration What of Marx and Engels’s analysis of the state and ideology (see 488–90 and 490–93 above)? In particular, how useful is their analysis of society’s political and legal institutions and forms of social consciousness as a “superstructure” which arises from society’s “economic foundation”? Certain commentators favorable to Marx have rejected the metaphor of economic base and political and ideological superstructure as central to historical materialism, seeing it as a hangover of “vulgar” Marxism.73 Yet, even if we abandon the metaphor of base and superstructure, it is nonetheless the “causal asymmetry” between the different elements of the social whole encapsulated in this metaphor which, for better or worse, gives Marxism its distinctiveness as a form of social theory and which must be central to any assessment of it.74 A detailed discussion of Marx and Engels’s specific claims about the state and ideology lies beyond the scope of this essay, and so I will confine myself to a consideration of two broader problems inherent in any conceptualization of society in terms of “base and superstructure”: those of the “interpenetration” of and the “interaction” between the two levels. Many critics of historical materialism have focused on the problem that while Marx presents society’s “economic foundation” as determining the nature of its political and ideological “superstructure” (29:263), in reality it is impossible to distinguish or separate social and economic relations from political, legal, and ideological factors, since the latter are actually constitutive elements in the former. But if base and superstructure interpenetrate, and so cannot be separated, it would be illegitimate to derive one from the other or to claim a primacy of one over the other, a conclusion which would undermine the whole thrust of Marx and Engels’s social theory.75 508 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 Once more, it is rather ironic that this objection should be raised against Marx and Engels, since the interpenetration of politics, economics, and social relations was central to their own analysis of feudal society. This was true both of their early works (1:303; 2:145, 364–65; 3:31–33, 72, 80, 109, 112, 165–67) and of their later analyses of feudal agriculture in terms of “extra-economic” forms of compulsion (37:776–77) and of feudal industry in terms of guild regulation (28:529). Indeed, far from being a criticism of Marxism, some Marxists have actually seen a stress on the interpenetration and interdependence of society’s forces and relations of production, politics, law, and ideology as constituting the strongest reading of Marx’s own social theory. Althusserian Marxism, for instance, insists that politics and ideology are not simply a superstructure added to a preexisting economic base but rather sees specific relations of production as presupposing legal, political, and ideological elements as a condition of their existence.76 Certainly, it is relatively easy to deal with the problem of interpenetration by recasting Marxism so that rather than being a claim for the primacy of the “economic” it becomes instead a claim for the primacy of society’s relations of production, including their constitutive elements from law, politics, and ideology, over the residual elements of the social “superstructure” which do not form part of the broadly defined relations of production.77 Base and superstructure: Interaction However, if Marxists have a ready answer to those critics who focus on the problems posed by the “interpenetration” of base and superstructure, they have far more problems in coping with the conceptually less-sophisticated issue of the interaction between the two. As we have seen, Marx and Engels sometimes refer to the social superstructure as an “echo” or “reflection” of its economic base (5:36, 193; 35:90; 49:34, 60, 61, 63). Such metaphors might seem to imply that politics and ideas are simply a passive consequence of economic change and thus have no active role in history, an idea which is likely to be accepted by few historians. As a result, in a series of famous letters from the 1890s which have been much admired by Marxist medievalists such as Delany and Hilton, Engels was obliged to deny that he and Marx had ever seen the superstructure as passive.78 Rather, the relationship between the economic base and the political and ideological superstructure was one of dialectical interaction, even if this interaction was one of “two unequal forces” within which “the economic trend is by far the strongest, the oldest and the most vital.” It is not that the base is active and the superstructure is passive but rather that there is a hierarchy of causal factors with Rigby / Historical Materialism 509 the base being primary and the superstructure secondary (49:7–8, 34–36, 59–63; see also 24:453; 37:779–80; 49:59–60).79 Struggling to express this idea, Maurice Dobb even presented the superstructure as an “active reflection” of the economic base, something which, as another former Manchester medievalist once pointed out, is actually a contradiction in terms.80 Marx and Engels’s belief that it is possible to establish a hierarchy of causal factors in history might seem unproblematic. After all, many nonMarxist historians also see it as the task of historians to establish hierarchies of causes,81 even if they see these hierarchies as historically specific rather than believing in the “ultimately decisive” role of economic conditions in each and every case (49:35). Yet, while causes objectively exist and are knowable by historians, arranging these causes in an order of importance seems to be a rather more subjective matter. That this is the case can be seen in the “Brenner debate” in which Marxist theory took center stage in discussion of economic change in medieval and early modern Europe.82 A key issue in the Brenner debate was the relative importance of population change and of class relations in explaining social and economic change. In making a claim for the causal primacy of any historical factor, such as population or class, historians are, in effect, producing a “contrastive statement,”83 since in order to pick out the factors which explain why, say, the English peasantry won its freedom in the later Middle Ages, we will, implicitly or explicitly, tend to look for some contrasting situation in which the peasants were nott able to win their freedom. Those such as Postan who stress the role of demographic fluctuations in historical change might therefore contrast the dramatic population decline of the later Middle Ages with the population growth of the thirteenth century and so conclude that when population was growing and land was scarce “the pressure of the landlords was more difficult to resist,” but that when population was falling and land was abundant the landlords were obliged to lower rents and to relax their manorial demands so as to retain their tenants.84 Alternatively, given that other historical examples, such as seventeenth-century Bohemia, show that a similar fall in population can just as easily lead to extra burdens and restrictions on the peasants as it does to peasant freedom, a Marxist historian such as Brenner is likely to question whether population change is the key variable and will search for some other contrasting factor, such as the strength of the peasant community and the balance of class forces between landlords and peasants, as the prime explanation of social change.85 If we contrast fifteenth-century England with the thirteenth century, population seems to be the main variable in explaining peasant freedom; if we 510 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 contrast fifteenth-century England with seventeenth-century Bohemia, the strength of the peasant community seems to be the key issue. In each case, what we emphasize as the primary factor in explaining social change in any particular situation will depend upon what we contrast that situation with. Ascribing causal primacy is therefore a matter of how we rhetorically present our analysis rather than of something inherent within the situation we are describing. It is a matter of analytical convenience rather than something that exists objectively within our subject matter. Thus, while Marxist historians are right to stress that demographic fluctuations, such as the population decline seen in late medieval England, acquired their significance for long-term social and economic change “only in connection with” specific class structures and class conflicts,86 we can still see such fluctuations as an indispensable factor in bringing such social and economic change about.87 However, it is not possible to say that one historical factor is “more indispensable” than another: something is either indispensable or it is not. Once we accept this, we can abandon the quest for historical prime movers and welcome the latest explanatory factor provided by historians as one more piece of the historical jigsaw, even though, by definition, no piece is ever the most important bit of the puzzle: the picture we create is the sum of all the pieces assembled together.88 However, let us assume for a moment that we couldd accept the Marxist identification of class struggle and the strength of the peasant community as the key factor in explaining why the English peasantry won its freedom in an age of population decline, whereas a similar population decline in Bohemia led to peasant enserfment. Immediately, the relative strength of the English peasant community compared to that in Bohemia would itself require an explanation. For instance, it might be accounted for in terms of differing settlement patterns, field systems, and agricultural technology, of population density or of the role of the state. In turn, each of these factors would require an explanation of its own. Thus, we might ask why the state helped to enserf the peasantries of eastern Europe, whereas in France it helped to bring about a security of peasant tenure, and in England it helped to encourage the rise of agrarian capitalism.89 In such cases, change in the political superstructure does not simply “express” prior social and economic change, but is itself an active determinant of the path of development taken by any particular society.90 Thus, in any specific historical situation, we are faced with an infinite regression of multiple, interacting factors in which it is arbitrary to pick out any one factor as ultimately determining or decisive (49:34–36, 60).91 Rigby / Historical Materialism 511 Medieval historians have proposed a variety of such autonomous variables that together explain long-term social and economic change. For instance, the adequacy of the bullion circulating within an economy (an important issue for the level of prices and demand) is not simply determined by the demands placed upon it by the growth of trade, as Marx and Engels claimed in the case of the bullion famine of the later Middle Ages (49:58; 26:558). Rather, change in the bullion supply can be brought about by a wide range of factors, as with the dynastic wars, tribal anarchy, and political change in West Africa in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which had a decisive impact on the flow of African gold into Europe.92 Demographic change, to give simply one more example, can also be an autonomous variable, most obviously in the case of epidemic disease such as the Black Death. Marx himself only made one passing reference to the Black Death, noting its effects of rising per capita productivity and increasing real wages (34:468). Yet modern Marxists such as Brenner have acknowledged that plague had a “central” role in explaining the late medieval crisis of seigneurial revenues, and that, as Bois points out, though famine and plague were sometimes linked, the plague could also “strike fiercely” even “where there appears to be no particular sign of malnutrition,” that is, where it was a variable acting independently of economic conditions.93 As Anderson puts it, the structural crisis of feudalism was “over-determined by a conjunctural catastrophe: the invasion of the Black Death,” which, when translated into non-Althusserian terms, seems to mean that, in explaining the crisis of feudalism, “a number of factors have to be taken into account.”94 It would be possible for many other such factors to be added to this list. Ironically, while Marxism’s critics often attack it for its supposed monocausal reductionism, Marxist historians and theoreticians themselves have tended to display an awareness of the active role played in history by this multiplicity of different causes. As a result, in practice, much Marxist historiography has tended to lapse into an explanatory pluralism in which, in Haldon’s words, an “infinite variety of local factors” bring about some particular historical outcome. As Bois put it in his account of the transition from ancient to feudal society, “there is no justification for claiming that it was dominated by the primacy of any specific ‘instance’ (economic, social, political, or ideological)”; rather, all of these instances were “inextricably intermingled” in a process that swept along “all elements indifferently.”95 Similarly, while Althusser’s structuralist reworking of historical materialism was attacked by E. P. Thompson for its supposed economic reductionism, Althusser himself presented his theory as a critique of reductionist, “base 512 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 and superstructure” readings of Marx that saw the social whole as an Hegelian “expressive totality.” Against this view, Althusser proposed an alternative conception of society as an organic totality in which each level or practice is relatively autonomous, is both determined and determining, and has its own internal conflicts and chronology of development; it is difficult to imagine many non-Marxist historians disagreeing with this view.96 This pluralism explains why Marxism is so easily assimilable into mainstream historiography: it is easily absorbed because it is not that different from mainstream historiography in the first place, a point that is intended as praise of Marxism, not as criticism.97 The professional practice of Marxist historians is thus actually more advanced in its implications than the version(s) of social theory to which Marxist historians themselves explicitly remain loyal.98 Certainly, the sophisticated analyses of the Middle Ages provided by Marxist and Marxist-influenced historians have made huge contributions to our understanding of the nature of medieval society. The task facing non-Marxist historians is to integrate the insights of Marxism into their own work; the task facing Marxist historians is to arrive at a recognition of the sophistication of their own pluralist analytical practice and to give expression to that practice in theoretical form.
Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 I would like to thank Rosalind Brown-Grant and Robert C. Nash for their detailed and perceptive comments on earlier drafts of this paper. G. Leff, The Tyranny of Concepts: A Critique of Marxism (London: Merlin, 1971), 7. Unless otherwise stated, all references to the works of Marx and Engels in the text, cited by volume and page numbers, come from the 49 volumes so far published of the 50-volume edition of their collected works, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, trans. Richard Dixon et al. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975–2001). Since there is rarely a view expressed by one of the two friends that cannot be found somewhere in the writings of the other, the works of Marx and Engels are treated here as a joint intellectual project. For a defence of this view, see S. H. Rigby, Engels and the Formation of Marxism: History, Dialectics, and Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). The notes below give references to the development of Marx and Engels’s ideas about medieval society in more recent Marxist work. P. Dockès, Medieval Slavery and Liberation (London: Methuen, 1982), 2–3. For the correspondence of society’s relations of production to its productive forces, see G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defencee (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 134–74; W. H. Shaw, Marx’s Theory of Historyy (London: Hutchinson, 1978), Rigby / Historical Materialism 513 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 53–82; J. McMurtry, The Structure of Marx’s World View w (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 54–71; A. Callinicos, Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theoryy (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 91–95; D. L. Donham, History, Power, Ideology: Central Issues in Marxism and Anthropologyy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 71–76; A. H. Carling, Social Division (London: Verso, 1991), 11–26; K. Graham, Karl Marx: Our Contemporary; Social Theory for a Post-Leninist Worldd (Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 64–75; E. Loone, Soviet Marxism and the Analytical Philosophy of Historyy (London: Verso, 1992), 163; P. Van Parijs, Marxism Recycledd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 9; A. Dorpalen, German History in Marxist Perspective: The East German Approach (London: I. B. Tauris, 1985), 24, 26. See also G. Bois, The Transformation of the Year One Thousand: The Village of Lournand from Antiquity to Feudalism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 40. R. Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe,” in T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debatee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 10–63, at 11–12. See also V. I. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 193–94. As modern Marxist historians such as Kosminsky and Hilton have shown, although rents in kind were significant in Anglo-Saxon England, they were usually converted into money rents or labor services after the Conquest. Even after the Conquest, large numbers of free tenants existed within medieval English society and “the bulk of rent and other seigneurial dues paid to landlords by English tenants, whether free or servile, was in money.” Indeed, apart from rents paid by demesne lessees and rents received by peasants who sublet their land to other peasants, rent in kind was of minor importance by the thirteenth century. See E. A. Kosminsky, Studies in the Agrarian History of Englandd (Oxford: Blackwell, 1956), 117–30, 152–63; R. Hilton, “Why Was There So Little Champart Rent in Medieval England?” Journal of Peasant Studiess 17 (1990): 509–19; F. J. West, “On the Ruins of Feudalism—Capitalism?” in E. Kamenka and R. S. Neale, eds., Feudalism, Capitalism, and Beyondd (London: Arnold, 1975), 50–60, at 58. See also Dockès, Medieval Slavery, 152; C. Wickham, The Mountains and the City: The Tuscan Appennines in the Early Middle Agess (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), chaps. 3, 8. For a calculation of the proportion of the medieval English peasantry’s output which was paid as rent, see S. H. Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status, and Genderr (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1995), 31–33. M. Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1963), 42– 48; Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure,” Brenner Debate, 33; R. Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” in Aston and Philpin, eds., Brenner Debate, 213– 327, at 214, 232–37. Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure,” Brenner Debate, 33. This translation of Marx’s words by D. Fernbach (from K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3 [Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1981], 925) 514 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 seems preferable to the version in the Collected Workss where the peasant’s holding is said to be “actually owned by him” (37:776). For the original German text, see K. Marx, Das Kapital, Buch III, Kapitel XXIX bis LIII (Hamburg, 1894), 323. I am grateful to my colleagues Theo Balderston and Till Geiger for guidance on this matter. 15 See, for instance, Lenin, Development of Capitalism, 194–95; Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, 36; R. H. Hilton, Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism (London: Hambledon, 1985), 123; R. H. Hilton, “A Crisis of Feudalism,” in Aston and Philpin, eds., Brenner Debate, 119–37, at 127; P. Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: New Left Books, 1977), 147–48; Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots,” Brenner Debate, 213–327, at 215; R. Brenner, “The Rises and Declines of Serfdom in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” in M. Bush, ed., Slavery and Serfdom: Studies in Legal Bondagee (London: Longman, 1996), 277–76, at 247–48; R. Brenner, “Economic Backwardness in Eastern Europe in the Light of Developments in the West,” in D. Chirot, ed., The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 15–52, at 20–24. 16 Hilton, Class Conflict, t 126; J. Hatcher, “English Serfdom and Villeinage: Towards a Re-assessment,” Past and Presentt 90 (1981): 3–39, at 7–8, 14–33, 37–39. 17 For Rodney Hilton, it was this “appropriation of surplus from the basic producers, masters and journeymen alike, through a manipulated tax system,” which was central to medieval urban class conflict. R. H. Hilton, English and French Towns in Feudal Society: A Comparative Studyy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 134– 41, 150. 18 See also Hilton, Class Conflict, t 164; Hilton, English and French Towns, 65. 19 Hilton, English and French Towns, 127–51; C. Dyer, “Small-Town Conflict in the Later Middle Ages: Events at Shipston-on-Stour,” Urban Historyy 19 (1992): 183–210, at 183–84. 20 Hilton, Class Conflict, t chaps. 7, 9, 11, 17; R. H. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free (London: Methuen, 1977), passim; Z. Razi, “The Toronto School’s Reconstitution of Medieval Peasant Society: A Critical View,” Past and Presentt 85 (1979): 141–57, at 152–57; Z. Razi, “The Struggles between the Abbots of Halesowen and Their Tenants in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” in T. H. Aston et al., eds., Social Relations and Ideas: Essays in Honour of R. H. Hilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 151–68; R. Faith, “The Class Struggle in Fourteenth-Century England,” in R. Samuel, People’s History and Socialist Theoryy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 50–60; R. Faith, “The ‘Great Rumour’ of 1377 and Peasant Ideology,” in R. H. Hilton and T. H. Aston, eds., The English Rising of 1381 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 43–73; C. Dyer, “A Redistribution of Incomes in Fifteenth-Century England,” in R. H. Hilton, ed., Peasants, Knights, and Hereticss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 192–215; C. Dyer, Everyday Life in Medieval Englandd (London: Hambledon, 1984), 191–239; C. Dyer, “Memories of Freedom: Attitudes Towards Serfdom in England, 1200–1350,” in Bush, ed., Slavery and Serfdom, 277–95; Dockès, Medieval Slavery, 199–200; H. J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historianss (Cambridge: Polity, 1984), 82–90; H. J. Kaye, “Acts of Re-appropriation: Rodney Hilton as Robin Hood,” Peasant Studiess 12 Rigby / Historical Materialism 515 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 (1985): 113–27; Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, 187–89, 202–4; Dorpalen, German History, 68–72, 90. For an example of a national peasants’ revolt that wass successful, see P. Freedman, The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Cataloniaa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 188–89. R. H. Hilton, “A Comment,” in R. H. Hilton et al., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1976), 109–17, at 115; R. H. Hilton, The Decline of Serfdom in Englandd (London: Macmillan, 1969), 32–43, 57; R. H. Hilton, “Warriors and Peasants,” New Left Review w 83 (1974): 83–94, at 92–94; Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure,” Brenner Debate, 11–12; Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots,” ibid., 212–15. See, for instance, Hilton, Class Conflict, t 123; R. H. Hilton, A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Centuryy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson), 218–19, 240–41; Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 151; Brenner, “Rises and Declines of Serfdom,” Slavery and Serfdom, ed. Bush, 260–61. For the origins of this idea, see A. Smith, The Wealth of Nationss (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1974), 499–500; P. Raedts, “Representations of the Middle Ages in Enlightenment Historiography,” The Medieval History Journall 5 (2002): 1–20, at 9–11. See, for instance, J. Given, State and Society in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 264–66; J. Haldon, The State and the Tributary Mode of Production (London: Verso, 1993), 34–39, 272–73; Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure,” Brenner Debate, 55. For debates about the legitimacy of functional explanation, see S. H. Rigby, Marxism and History: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), chap. 6; Rigby, Engels and the Formation of Marxism, 182–84. See also S. H. Rigby, “Medieval England: To Have and Have Not,” New Left Review 236 (1999): 154–59, at 158–59. For medieval examples, see S. H. Rigby, “England: Literature and Society,” in S. H. Rigby, ed., A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003): 497–520, at 502–3; and P. Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 79–85. For medieval examples, see S. H. Rigby, Chaucer in Context: Society, Allegory and Genderr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 62. Hilton, Class Conflict, t 222; R. H. Hilton and H. Fagan, The English Rising of 1381 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1950), 51, 64–66. For the centrality of the Church in feudal society, see A. Guerreau, Le Fé Féodalisme: Un Horizon Théorique é e (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1980), 201–10. I am grateful to Julien Demade for this reference. See, for instance, E. A. Thompson, The Visigoths in the Time of Ulfilaa (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), 107–10; B. H. Rosenwein and L. K. Little, “Social Meaning in the Monastic and Mendicant Spiritualities,” Past and Presentt 63 (1974): 4–32; L. K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europee (London: Paul Elek, 1978), passim. Hilton and Fagan, English Rising, g 71–72. 516 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 S. H. Rigby, “The Wife of Bath, Christine de Pizan, and the Medieval Case for Women,” Chaucer Review w 35 (2000–01): 133–65, at 151; Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant, t 44–50, 102, 147, 239, 258. For a similar analysis of Lollardy, see Hilton, Class Conflict, t 224. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 108–9, 223. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, 134. See also Graham, Karl Marx, 64–69; J. A. Hughes, P. J. Martin, and W. W. Sharrock, Understanding Classical Sociology: Marx, Weber, Durkheim (London: Sage, 1995), 47–51. For a similar assumption of the inherent growth of the productive forces as the key to social change, see E. A. Thompson, The Early Germanss (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 28. P. Sweezy, “A Critique,” in Hilton et al., eds., The Transition, 33–56, at 41–46. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 121. Ibid., 507–20. In this tradition, see Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, 38–42; R. Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review w 104 (1977): 25–92; J. Merrington, “Town and Country in the Transition to Capitalism,” in Hilton et al., eds., The Transition, 170–95; Hilton, Class Conflict, t 175–86; Hilton, English and French Towns, 6–52. For an attempt to reconcile this approach with an emphasis on the dynamic role of towns and trade, see I. Katznelson, Marxism and the Cityy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 161–63, 175–91; and J. Torras, “Class Struggle in Catalonia: A Note on Brenner,” Review: Journal of the Fernand Braudel Centerr 4 (1980): 253–65. For the origins of this idea, see Smith, Wealth of Nations, 509–14; J. Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, vol. 1 (London, 1767), 52. Rather than stressing the conflict between feudal landlords and the rising bourgeoisie, modern Marxists have tended to develop Engels’s comments about the compromise between these classes which emerged in England from the late fifteenth century (27:292). See R. S. Neale, Writing Marxist Historyy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 85; R. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 640–43, 648–49. One instance of this is Marx and Engels’s claim that the Wars of the Roses led to the “extermination” of the feudal nobility and its replacement by a new aristocracy of bourgeois extraction (10:443; 23:599; 26:564–65; 27:292; 35:709). In fact, “it is doubtful whether the rates of extinction among the nobility was higher in the half century 1450–1500 than in any other half-century since the Conquest.” See K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval Englandd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 15, 146–49, 172–76; C. Ross, The Wars of the Roses: A Concise Historyy (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 151–52, 156–57. For references to the works of these authors, see the bibliography in Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages. On Kosminsky, see also P. Gatrell, “Historians and Peasants: Studies of Medieval English Society in a Russian Context,” Past and Present 96 (1982): 39–41. Rigby / Historical Materialism 517 46 C. Middleton, “The Sexual Division of Labour in Feudal England,” New Left Review 113–14 (1979): 147–68; C. Middleton, “Peasants, Patriarchy, and the Feudal Mode of Production in England,” Sociological Review w 29 (1981): 105–54; P. Corrigan and D. Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 15–42. 47 For references to these authors, see the bibliography in Rigby, Chaucer in Context. For Harwood, see B. J. Harwood, “Chaucer and the Silence of History: Situating the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale,” PMLA 102 (1987): 338–50; and Harwood, “Building Class and Gender in Chaucer’s Hous,” in B. J. Harwood and G. R. Overing, eds., Class and Gender in Early English Literature: Intersectionss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 95–111. 48 R. H. Hilton, “The Origins of Robin Hood,” in Hilton, Peasants, Knights, and Heretics, 221–35. See also A. J. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culturee (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985). 49 C. Wickham, “The Other Transition: From the Ancient World to Feudalism,” Past and Presentt 103 (1984): 3–36, at 9, 20, 27–28; Bois, The Transformation, 18–24, 35, 48–50, 67, 135, 153, 157–59, 167. 50 For recent examples, see E. M. Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chap. 4; J. Ferraro, Freedom and Determination in History According to Marx and Engelss (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1992), 121–27. See also nn. 56–58 below. 51 For Marx’s account of this “formal” (as opposed to “real”) subsumption of labor in early capitalism, see Rigby, Marxism and History, 234–36. 52 D. Aers, Chaucerr (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1986), 18–20; S. Knight, Geoff rey Chaucerr (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 74, 78, 127–28, 131–34. 53 R. H. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000–1500, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 228, 233–34. 54 Dockès, Medieval Slavery, 153, 161, 165, 169–74. See also C. Wickham, Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Societyy (London: Macmillan, 1981), 92–94; R. Saller, “Framing the Debate over Growth: The Ancient Economy,” in W. Scheidel and S. von Reden, eds., The Ancient Economyy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 251–69, at 259–60; Dorpalen, German History, 65. 55 R. H. Hilton and P. H. Sawyer, “Technical Determinism: The Stirrup and the Plough,” Past and Presentt 24 (1963): 90–100, at 95–100; Hilton, “Warriors and Peasants,” 90– 92; Donham, History, Power, Ideology, 61. See also the references in nn. 56–59 below. 56 R. H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 174–214; R. H. Hilton, “A Comment,” in Hilton, ed., The Transition, 115; Hilton, Decline of Serfdom, 32–43, 57; Hilton, “A Crisis of Feudalism,” Brenner Debate, 132–33; C. J. Katz, From Feudalism to Capitalism (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 3–4, 173–83; Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure,” Brenner Debate, passim; Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots,” ibid., passim; Brenner, “The Rises and Declines of Serfdom,” Slavery and Serfdom, ed. Bush, 269–75; Brenner, “Economic Backwardness in Eastern Europe,” Origins of Backwardness, ed. Chirot, 18–20, 26–27; R. Brenner, “Property Relations and the Growth of Agricultural Productivity in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” in A. Bhaduri and R. Skarstein, eds., Eco518 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 nomic Development and Agricultural Productivityy (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1997), 9–44, at 12–28; J. E. Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism: Peasant and Landlord in English Agrarian Developmentt (London: Macmillan, 1983), 46–157; C. Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, c. 1200–15000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 6–7. See also J. Elster, Making Sense of Marxx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 278, 286. Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, 204. I. Johsua, La Face Cachée é du Moyen Age (Montreuil: La Brèche, 1988), 13. Dockès, Medieval Slavery, 153, 156, 182. For an attempt to reconcile these two approaches, see Carling, Social Division, 11–69; and T. Mayer, Analytical Marxism (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1994), 55. For a critique of Carling, see my review in Social Historyy 18 (1993): 126–29. R. Mousnier, Social Hierarchies: 1450 to the Presentt (London: Croom Helm, 1973), 18–19, 49–50; J. Blum, The End of the Old Order in Rural Europee (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 4–6, 440–41; M. Keen, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, 1348–15000 (London: Penguin, 1990), 1–4; Kaye, The British Marxist Historians, 74–75. For a modern Marxist discussion of this issue, see G. E. M. De Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests (London: Duckworth, 1981), 69–95. Hilton, A Medieval Society, 25–40; Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 50–52; Hilton, The English Peasantry, 219–20; Dyer, Standards of Living, g 21–22, 25; C. Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain, 850–15200 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), 8. G. Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imaginedd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 9, 355; M. Moisa, “Fourteenth-Century Preachers’ Views of the Poor: Class or Status Group,” in R. Samuel and G. S. Jones, eds., Culture, Ideology, and Politics: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 160–75, at 161. For the use of “closure theory” for an analysis of social inequality in the Middle Ages, see S. H. Rigby, “Approaches to Pre-industrial Social Structure,” in J. H. Denton, ed., Orders and Hierarchies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europee (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1999), 6–25. For discussions of Marxism and gender inequalities, see the works of Middleton in n. 46 above; and also Rigby, Engels and the Formation of Marxism, 198–204; Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, 257–62. For the original text, see Marx, Das Kapital, Buch III, I 323. B. Hindess and P. Q. Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 237–38; Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, 3–16. S. H. Rigby, “Serfdom,” in J. Mokyr, ed., The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Economic History, 5 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 4:463–67, at 465. For discussion of this view, see R. Faith, The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship (London: Leicester University Press, 1999), 223. Hatcher, “English Villeinage and Serfdom,” 7–8, 14–33, 37–39. S. L. Thrupp, “Medieval Gilds Reconsidered,” Journal of Economic Historyy 2 (1942): Rigby / Historical Materialism 519 164–73; E. M. Veale, “Craftsmen and the Economy of London in the Fourteenth Century,” in A. E. J. Hollaender and W. Kellaway, eds., Studies in London History Presented to Philip Edmund Joness (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969), 131–51; H. Swanson, Medieval British Townss (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1999), 96–101; Hilton, English and French Towns in Feudal Society, 72–77; S. Rees Jones, “Household, Work, and the Problem of Mobile Labour,” in J. Bothwell, P. J. P. Goldberg, and W. M. Ormrod, eds., The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century Englandd (York: York Medieval Press, 2000), 133–53. 73 L. Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin (London: New Left Books, 1972), 65; D. Sayer, The Violence of Abstraction: The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 148; P. Lekas, Marx on Classical Antiquity: Problems of Historical Methodologyy (Brighton, Sussex: Wheatsheaf, 1988), 229; Given, State and Society, 3; Haldon, The State and the Tributary Mode of Production, 42–44; J. Torrance, Karl Marx’s Theory of Ideass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3–9; Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 49, 67. 74 M. Weber, Critique of Stammlerr (New York: The Free Press, 1977), 87, 92; E. J. Hobsbawm, “Karl Marx’s Contribution to Historiography,” in R. Blackburn, ed., Ideology in Social Sciencee (London: Fontana, 1973), 278–80; A. Cutler, et al. Marx’s “Capital” and Capitalism Today, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977– 78), vol. 1, chap. 8; E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theoryy (London: Merlin, 1978), 84; T. Lovell, Pictures of Realityy (London: BFI, 1980), 28; E. O. Wright, A. Levine, and E. Sober, Reconstructing Marxism (London: Verso, 1992), 59, 133; Graham, Karl Marx, 42–44. 75 H. B. Acton, The Illusion of the Epoch: Marxism-Leninism as a Philosophical Creedd (1955; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 164–68, 177–78, 258–59; J. Plamenatz, Man and Society, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (London: Longman, 1992), 3:159– 76, 232; S. Lukes, “Can the Base Be Distinguished from the Superstructure?” in D. Miller and L. Siedentop, eds., The Nature of Political Theoryy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 103–19; R. Wokler, “Rousseau and Marx,” ibid., 219–46, at 229–37. 76 L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capitall (London: New Left Books, 1975), 177; L. Althusser, For Marxx (London: Allen Lane, 1971), 87–128. For discussion of Althusser’s structuralist reworking of Marxism, see Rigby, Marxism and History, x–xi, 194–98. 77 G. Lukács, History and Class Consciousnesss (London: Merlin, 1971), 55–59; M. Godelier, “Infrastructures, Society, and History,” New Left Review w 112 (1978): 84–96; M. Godelier, “The Ideal in the Real,” in Samuel and Jones, eds., Culture, Ideology, and Politics, 12–38; M. Godelier, The Mental and the Materiall (London: Verso, 1988), passim; M. Rader, Marx’s Interpretation of Historyy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), chaps. 1–2; Sayer, Violence of Abstraction, 70, 145; Callinicos, Making History, 175–76; Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, chap. 1; S. H. Rigby, “Making History,” in History of European Ideass 12 (1990): 827–31, at 829; Haldon, The State and the Tributary Mode of Production, 44–45; Donham, History, Power, Ideology, 6–11; R. S. Gottlieb, “Feudalism and Historical Materialism,” Science and Societyy 48 (1984): 1–37, at 3–4, 36; J. M. Bak, “Serfs and Serfdom: Words and Things,” Review: Journal of the Fernand Braudel Centerr 4 (1980): 3–18; Bois, The Transformation, 70. 520 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 R. H. Hilton, “Unjust Taxation and Popular Resistance,” New Left Review w 180 (1990): 177–84, at 178; S. Delany, Medieval Literary Politicss (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 43. See also K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondencee (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 441–43 (Engels to Borgius, 25 Jan. 1894). M. Dobb, “Historical Materialism and the Role of the Economic Factor,” Historyy 36 (1951): 1–11, at 4; E. John, “Some Questions on the Materialist Conception of History,” Historyy 38 (1953): 1–10, at 4. See, for instance, E. H. Carr, What Is History?? (London: Macmillan, 1962), 83–84, 97. See the articles reprinted in Aston and Philpin, eds., Brenner Debate. F. Dretske, “Contrastive Statements,” Philosophical Review w 81 (1972): 411–37. M. M. Postan, The Medieval Economy and Societyy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1972), 27, 151–52. Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure,” Brenner Debate, 11–12, 21, 34–46; A. Klima, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Bohemia,” in Aston and Philpin, eds., Brenner Debate, 192–212, at 195–202; Freedman, Origins of Peasant Servitude, 176. Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots,” Brenner Debate, 213. M. Bailey and J. Hatcher, Modelling the Middle Ages: The History and Theory of England’s Economic Developmentt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 119–20, 179– 80. See S. H. Rigby, “Historical Causation: Is One Thing More Important Than Another?” Historyy 80 (1995): 227–42, for references to those thinkers who have adopted this approach to causation and explanation, one which derives ultimately from J. S. Mill, A System of Logic, c 2 vols. (London, 1843), 1:399–409. See, for instance, Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure,” Brenner Debate, 54–59; Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots,” ibid., 284–99; Klima, “Agrarian Class Structure,” 194–202. Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots,” Brenner Debate, 289; Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure,” ibid., 58; Corrigan and Sayer, The Great Arch, 85; Dockès, Medieval Slavery, 239; G. C. Comminel, “English Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism,” Journal of Peasant Studiess 27.4 (1999–2000): 1–53, at 22–26; Bois, The Transformation, 163. S. Hook, The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibilityy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1945), 71–74. J. Day, The Medieval Market Economyy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 36–38. See also Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, 199–200. G. Bois, Crise du Fé Féodalismee (Paris: Presses de la Foundation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1981), 277–79; Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots,” Brenner Debate, 267–70; Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, 137; Bailey and Hatcher, Modelling the Middle Ages, 19–20, 57, 177–80; M. M. Postan and J. Hatcher, “Population and Class Relations in Feudal Society,” in Aston and Philpin, eds., Brenner Debate, 64–78, at 76 n. 24. Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, 201. For “overdetermination,” see Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, l 315–16. Rigby / Historical Materialism 521 95 J. Haldon, “The Ottonian State and the Question of State Autonomy: Comparative Perspectives,” Journal of Peasant Studiess 18 (1991): 18–184, at 88–89; Bois, The Transformation, 166–69; see also Donham, History, Power, Ideology, 133–37. 96 Thompson, Poverty of Theory, 254, 355, 360; Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, l 17, 97–98, 177, 183; Althusser, For Marx, 96–101, 103, 113. For Althusser’s attempt to salvage his theory as a form of Marxism and a critique of his “structural causality,” see Rigby, Marxism and History, 196–69, 201–4. See also the commentaries on Althusser listed in Rigby, Marxism and History, xv n. 16. 97 S. H. Rigby, “Marxist Historiography” in M. Bentley, ed., Companion to Historiography (London: Routledge, 1997), 889–928, at 913–15; S. H. Rigby, “Historical Materialism,” in T. Carver and M. Steger, eds., Engels After Marxx (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 109–53, at 134–37. That Marxism can be so easily assimilated with non-Marxist history is also, of course, the product of the profound ways in which Marxism itself has influenced modern historical writing; see E. Hobsbawm, On Historyy (London: Abacus, 1998), 224. 98 G. Kitching, Karl Marx and the Philosophy of Praxiss (London: Routledge, 1988), 225. 522 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 34.3 / 2004