Thread by @WatTylerRising

On the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism and the #GND, or Why I Read Mostly #Medieval History For My Thesis Despite Being an Urban Planner.

A thread:

First the why:

At its root, the Green New Deal is a blueprint for a transition from one mode of production to a new, yet to be defined mode of production. Fossil Capital is in its end stage and what comes next is up to us. Nothing is inevitable; everything is contestable.

My thesis explores how municipal policies can hasten the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, redress specific social deficits from exploitative economic and political policies, and create a just and sustainable future. What policies fundamentally alter social relations?

To understand how best to resolve existing and limit future exploitation and social deficits, I wanted to understand the historical forces that created them. Solving contradictions requires pinpointing their specificity. So I turned to the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

In the feudal mode of production, Lords exercised both political and economic powers; the method of surplus extraction was direct coercion by the threat of privatized violence. In capitalism, coercive power resides with the state, but economic appropriation remains privatized.

The standard account for what caused this transition goes like this: the fall of Rome pushed Europe into centuries of the "dark ages". Political power disintegrated and trade and technological development ceased. Then, the Crusades reopened trade routes and commerce increased.

The increase in commerce allowed for successful merchants, through frugality and business acumen, to accumulate enough wealth to reinvest in improving production. Eventually, these merchants clashed with the government, leading to an end of feudal customs and obligations.

This narrative does not stand up to scrutiny against the historical record. One example, the fall of Rome is thought of as a specific rupture point caused by "Barbarian" invasions. But recent scholarship argues for a long transition, not a rupture, caused by internal problems.

Indeed, it appears migration had little to do with the collapse (Guy Halsall's work on migrations and contesting the idea of a cohesive "Germanic" ethnic group on Rome's borders actually a key to disputing Replacement Theory, but that's for another day).

Likewise, the commercial explanation for capitalism's development doesn't hold up to scrutiny. To start, the idea of the Middle Ages as devoid of trade has been thoroughly debunked at least since M M Postan's Trade and Industry in the Middle Ages was published in 1952.

Crucially, it does not explain how capitalism developed; rather, it assumes the existence of a latent capitalist tendency that needed feudal obstacles removed to flourish. The resumption of trade restored the natural progression of history that feudalism disrupted.

In this treatment, capitalism is transhistoric and universal. The increased commerce allowed frugal merchants to accumulate enough wealth to turn into investments in increasing labor productivity. This is Smith's primitive-original accumulation, a sketch of a meritocracy.

Marx rejects this theory of primitive-accumulation; he reminds us the capital isn't simply wealth or profit but a specific social relationship to property and the means of production, and subject to the imperatives of the market.

Florence and the Dutch Republic illustrate this. For all their commercial success, the ruling elite in both still relied on extra-economic power to appropriate surplus production. They used monopoly powers, military invasion, and financial innovations to enhance their wealth.

Florence and the Dutch Republic produced great wealth and profit without transforming feudal social relations into capitalist ones. Primitive accumulation cannot be attributed to these commercial societies. The development of capitalism required transforming property relations.

Marx proposes an alternative site of primitive accumulation: the English countryside. Here, as landlords increasingly derived rents from productive tenant-farmers; less productive farmers joined the wage labor force. This is where capitalism's laws of motion start.

Ellen Meiksins Wood defines these laws: "The *imperatives* of competition and profit-maximization, a *compulsion* to reinvest surpluses, and a systematic and relentless *need* to improve labor-productivity and develop the forces of production."

Marx was not able to point point the mechanism that caused this change. Enter historian Robert Brenner, author of "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe". Building off Marx, Brenner looked for a dynamic endogenous to English feudalism.

England was unique in that it had a relatively unified central state where the aristocracy actively participated with the crown in governing the kingdom. In contrast, in continental Europe, the aristocracy and the monarchy were often engaged in jurisdictional conflicts.

As a result of this relative unity, the English aristocracy demilitarized well before their continental counterparts. The state assumed the role of enforcing order and protecting property, and the nobility lost access to their extra-economic powers.

The decline of serfdom by 1300s created a large class of tenant farmers with customary claims to land and fixed rent as conditions of emancipation. However, they did not have freehold over the land - hereditary ownership in perpetuity.

Peasants with freehold claim threatened the position of the aristocracy, which tried to undermine these claims. However, without access to extra-economic power, landlords had to rely on economic methods of extraction. 1)they consolidated land abandoned during the plague.

2) They exacted fines on sales and inheritances for freehold claims that were too high for tenants to afford. The effect of both strategies was a concentration of arable land in the hands of the English aristocracy that could be leased to the highest bidder at variable rates.

The combined enforced scarcity of land and variable rental terms created a compulsion for competition and improvement of productivity amongst peasant proprietors to maintain their access to farmland. exchange for food and shelter.

Dispossessed tenants provided the labor these farms needed for competitive productivity at barely subsistence wages or in exchange for food and shelter. For both capitalist and labor, access to the means of survival depended on market imperatives and competition.

Enclosure is perhaps the best example of this. It was not just the fencing off of common land, but the extinguishing of customary rights and protections that allowed for the peasantry to replicate itself. It meant violent evictions. It was a massive social disruption.

So what does this have to do with the Green New Deal? By being able to locate the historical process that set capitalism in motion, we can give light to the class antagonism that we still live with and the Green New Deal must try to resolve.

Capitalist social relations arise out of cleaving the peasantry and forcing competition for the land necessary for the basic reproduction of each peasant family, then reproduce by forcing capitalist to compete with capitalist, labor to compete with labor for means of survival.

For the Green New Deal to successful in transforming the mode of production to be sustainable and equitable, this is the antagonism that needs to be resolved. The right to a home, the right to a job, the right to the means of survival, the right to a safe comfortable life -

these were all questions being asked during the last transition. The Homes Guarantee addresses dispossession and competition for land, the Jobs Guarantee and Basic Income address the inter-class competition that labor is forced into for the means of survival.

Alright, that's the end for now. Sources for this are Ellen Meiksins-Wood's The Origins of Capitalism, Julie Mell's Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender, and Robert Brenner's "Agrarian Class Structure."