The state’s main function has always been to set up tollgates between labor and consumption, between our skills and the ability to transform them into use-value for ourselves, so that a privileged minority could live off the rents on artificial scarcity. Under chattel slavery, that meant “owning” the actual producers themselves with legal title to all their labor, and providing them with bare subsistence out of their labor product, while their owners appropriated the surplus.
Over time the privileged classes have experimented with various expedients for determining the share of the product left to the laborer in order to maximize the rentiers’ total income in absolute terms. They’ve been quite willing, for the most part, to increase the producers’ relative share and with it the incentives for making a larger pie — so long as the absolute size of the slice appropriated by the rentiers didn’t decline. But when increasing the size of the pie has meant a smaller slice for them, they’ve never wavered in choosing productive inefficiency as a condition of efficient exploitation.
Under serfdom and other medieval labor regimes, the ruling class politically appropriated the land and forced its rightful owners — those who cultivated it and mixed their labor with it — to pay a portion of their labor product as a condition of access to the land. Producers were given a fixed rent, either as a percentage or in absolute terms, and left with the remainder of their output for themselves.
In the capitalist era, in both its early modern agrarian variants and the later industrial system, the ruling classes allowed market mechanisms to operate within a framework of medieval property forms and class monopolies. Throughout the capitalist era, the state has encouraged as much market activity, within the framework of state-enforced monopoly, as was compatible with maximizing exploitation. Under the classic form of capitalism, as it existed through the mid-19th century on, the market applied mainly to consumption. The realm of production was still governed by power, with the propertied classes controlling access to opportunities to produce.
Under the monopoly capitalism which arose in the late 19th century, exploitation extended to the realm of consumption, with the rentier classes using artificial scarcities like “intellectual property” and assorted regulatory cartels to extract surplus from consumers via unequal exchange.
Today, in the dying days of monopoly capitalism, the state’s role in surplus extraction is specifically to protect the rentier classes against competition from the technologies of abundance. A good example is public library ebooks, designed to self-destruct after 20 readings.
Another way of protecting the rentiers from abundance is compelling us to purchase waste output as condition of buying what we actually need. For example, as recounted by Jessica Mitford in “The American Way of Death,” at one time the law in many states required the purchase of a casket even for cremating a body, thus compelling grieving families to support an industry they had no need of as a condition for burying their dead.
At all times and all places, since the beginning of the state and of class stratification, it has been the same basic idea: By erecting a tollgate between labor and consumption, to force us to support a parasitic rentier class in addition to ourselves, as a condition for being allowed to support ourselves at all.
This is what the state does. This is what the state always does. The state is the political means to wealth. Every state has been, and every state will be, a class state that enforces transactions in which one privileged party benefits at the expense of an unprivileged other. The state puts a majority of us in a position of accepting exchange on terms which nobody would willingly accept absent restrictions on the alternatives available to us.
The state, in short, forces us to feed a monkey on our backs in return for the right to live at all, in return for the right to feed ourselves.
And if you think the agenda promoted by Social Democrats, liberals and “Progressives” the past century or so has been a fundamental departure from this principle, don’t delude yourselves. Capitalists have been at the heart of liberal and Social Democratic coalitions. Liberalism, Social Democracy, is still capitalism. All the modifications of capitalism that make exploitation less harsh and unpleasant, from the perspective of the exploited, are equivalent to adaptive modifications in a parasite that stabilize and enable its parasitism in the long run by making it more tolerable for the host organism.
The only real alternative is to dump the monkey off your back altogether — to eliminate the state and the system of class exploitation it enforces, so that all exchanges and relationships are mutually beneficial ones between equals.
The sentence is extremely important. More particularly: eliminate the state AND the system of class exploitation it enforces. The dividing line between a genuine anarchist (whatever school) and a mere anti-statist is the ability to recognize and oppose that exploitation equally. It is not enough to get rid of one or the other, waiting for the remaining oppression to wither away. As long as one persists, the other is sure to return even if under a different name.
The battle between progressives and conservatives is this: Shall we rule the lower orders with a velvet glove or an iron fist? Shall we speak the language of fairness, or the language of order & tradition? (Both may speak the language of liberty when it suits them.) Shall we exploit the poorer regions while clothing it with 'aid', or will naked exploitation be the order of the day? Shall we accept a few 'reasonable' limitations on our powers, or are such limitations inconvenient? Shall we awe them by expertise or by images of our 'national heritage' & parchment? And who shall be the bogeyman of the day? The communists/socialists/whatever? The militias? The ill-defined 'radicals/extremists'? The atheists? The fundamentalists? Sporadic criminals? Those who enjoy themselves in ways we don't approve of?
Note, that the actual views of the public are never to be consulted. They are only to be shaped, with varying degrees of success. This is because, as with every society hitherto existing, there exists a fundamental and irreconcilable conflict of interests. The battle is between those who own/rule and those who are owned/ruled. The methods change, the classes change, the relationship remains the same. This conflict may be masked by national myths; by those who think it is possible to transcend class lines; or to justify them on 'merit'; or to simply deny/diminish them.
But, it is there. People do not speak of it; half in fear, half in the wish the words do not have meaning. But this reality cannot be evaded. The solution, while not always violent, require trying what has never been tried; to live without the exploiters.
One thing that hits home for me, with rentiers, is with laptops. Notice the way they are designed; they do not admit of easy replacement or repair of parts. That's 'proprietary'. But this extends to desktops; the latest components cost so much largely because of patents & branding. Geoffrey Miller in 'Spent', a look at consumer capitalism via evolutionary psychology, described it as selling the sizzle and not the steak.
I for one am no longer willing to shell out hundreds-or even thousands-for sizzle. Nor should anyone else.
Um… that’s not what usually happened, in that the usual case was that the ruling class were the rightful owners, having obtained the land through voluntary exchanges with the then occupiers during the Dark Ages, giving them protection from raiders in return. However, we may be more familiar with the situation in England, where it was indeed obtained otherwise (by conquest, in this case) – but the English cannot be said to be “rightful owners” in the sense of getting the land by taking in unoccupied land and working it, since they themselves only held it because of their own earlier conquests of the native British.
It is important to remember that, at least in Britain and quite possibly elsewhere, there was in fact a tension between the landed and mercantile classes that meant their interests sometimes diverged and the outcomes were therefore not always so monopolistic and could help the working classes, e.g. with the Repeal of the Corn Laws.
But I have told people all these things before.
Lawrence, what you describe seems to be the distinction between freemen and "ordinary" serfs. Yes, freemen could abandon their land tenure if, say, war or famine rendered them unable to properly care for themselves. However, they STILL paid land-rents to a lord, despite the greater freedoms and property rights associated with their station.
The question, in the historical lngview, is why the freeman owed rent to the lord of his manor anyway. The answer is, all of the land is considered claimed by the crown and then divided up into manors at the crown's discretion, freemen notwithstanding.
Are we to believe that, fundamentally, the CROWN obtained its allodial title to all land by such voluntary transfers as you describe? Or did the farmers find their land suddenly declared part of a manor, and themselves expected to provide land rents to the newly-declared lord? And if these rents led to barer subsistence and greater risk as a result, and the (ostensibly) freemen thus had to, for survival, submit further to the requirements of serfdom, binding their labor, land, and (oh yes) descendants perpetually to the manor, that this constitutes a "voluntary exchange"?
I'm no expert on the history of feudalism but I've never heard a version of the story where truly free farmers traded their land away for protection from rentiers who otherwise collected nothing of them…
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> A good example is public library ebooks, designed to self-destruct after 20 readings.
Does that mean "after 20 viewings"? Because allowing me to only read a book 20 times is not much of a restriction…
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TheBaker on May 11, 2012, 1:20 pm wrote:
No, it isn’t. I was covering how the land passed to its feudal owners, not how the people did. That covers both cases, free tenants and serfs. Sometimes there were already unfree people on the land, left over from Roman systems, and they were transferred along with the land by whoever owned it and them (strategic marriages between Gallo-Roman aristocrats and barbarian warlords were quite common). Sometimes free people allowed themselves to be enserfed too, to get the protection (or to get land that they weren’t on), either at the same time or later. Russian serfdom mostly grew like that after the 16th century, when Russian magnates got the vacant land that had just been taken from the Tartars and Turks and was being made safe from raiding; Brad DeLong shows that Evsey Domar covers that process well in his 1970 work “The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis”.
That may be your question, but it wasn’t mine. Mine was, who were the “rightful” owners and why, to which the answer was that it was murky, but that often the formal owners had a better claim than the occupiers.
But that answer of yours is incorrect, even for your own question, except in unusual cases where the Crown – separately – claimed and took it before that apportionment happened. England was such a case, but more usually the Crown came along afterwards and gradually took the land from its feudal owners. The feudal owners were logically and chronologically prior.
No, you are not to believe any of that, none of which I either wrote or implied; that is entirely a result of your interpolating your own expectations of how things were, e.g. that the Crown originally granted title to the land to the feudal owners. But those expectations are wrong. The French Crown, for instance, picked up allods from feudal magnates over time, by legal trickery, by force, by inheritance, and so on; the only ones it started out with were those the king had in his capacity as Count of Paris, that had been acquired that way – but by the Count, not by the King.
The voluntary stuff happened before the Middle Ages, in the west. Local strong men offered protection from raiders during the Dark Ages; the exchanges were distress sales, but they were indeed voluntary in that it wasn’t the acquirers who were pressuring people.
That is an unfortunate wording. It covers both the actual and voluntary case in which protection from others was involved, and the unusual (because often unnecesary) case of a protection racket in which the protectors offer protection from themselves – as in England. If you don’t know this stuff, you can look up the Domar material I covered, or you could read the well-grounded historical novels of Alfred Duggan and then fill that out with the works of François Ganshof and his successors, e.g. Ganshof’s “Feudalism”.
I myself have never done it, and to be fair it is a small thing. Depends on how the program interprets 'viewings'. It could mean the book can only be opened by the program 20 times. But, I'll check one such ebook out and report my findings.
The re-subjugation of the peasantry in both Western and Eastern Europe was hardly just freeholders giving up their land in exchange for protection from- what, Vikings? Magyars? It had a great deal more to do with the re-emerging power of royal authority and 'state' institutions, and it was a continual process; the free or semi-free peasantry did not disappear over night in the 'Dark Ages,' nor did they just cede over their land for protection from Viking raiders. It was a struggle on the part of the re-emergent aristocracy, in all its permutations, to re-assert dominance and control. It took a very long time in some places; for instance, in much of Eastern Europe full enserfment was only achieved in the early modern period. The process in either half of Europe can hardly be described as 'voluntary exchange.'
At least, this is my understanding of the process; I am mostly drawing up my memory of Chris Wickam's arguments in Framing the Early Middle Ages, which seems, from what early medieval economic history I've dabbled in since, to be a pretty accurate assessment.
Jonathan, you too are filling in things I didn’t say. The result is that you are making accurate comments about something else, something that came later. Royal authority and state institutions started to re-emerge around about the 11th century, much as you describe, and reached their high point within feudal constraints around the late 13th century, by the processes I mentioned earlier. They grew yet further after that, leading eventually to absolutism, but that was post-feudal.
However, the processes that eventually led to feudal land ownership, that I was covering, fell mostly in the period between the barbarian invasions of the 5th century and the final decay of the barbarian, clannish kingdoms in the 7th and maybe early 8th centuries (so, not proceeding from royal authority and state institutions, and well before the Vikings and Magyars – you left out Saracens; I have heard that one monastery was raided by each of those in the space of a generation, in their later period). The raiders hitting a given area would have been other barbarians, based elsewhere than the local barbarians but of much the same sort, and the local ones would have had incentives and opportunities to offer locals the sort of protection I outlined (just as – technically after the main part of all that – the French Crown gave an area that had been laid waste by other Vikings to one particular group of Vikings to settle and rule, to keep the others out, so making Normandy). The point to notice is that, just as Darwinian competition isn’t wolves competing with sheep but with wolves for sheep, so also the very real “struggle on the part of the re-emergent aristocracy, in all its permutations, to re-assert dominance and control” wasn’t a struggle with the exploited. No, that came out in the wash, so to speak; the struggle was among themselves, to gain the areas in which the locals preferred a steady hand to a hit and run raider who left them with less – the logic being, a “sessile” exploiter had long term interests and left them with something for the future (this is also a standard picture). The actual exchanges can be described as voluntary, in the sense I gave, in that the locals were indeed under duress but the acquirers were not applying that duress: as between the contracting parties, there was no duress. Some Norman gains in the early Middle Ages recapitulated this process, while others followed the stereotypical pattern of conquest that most people have in their minds already.
This is much less applicable in Eastern Europe, in that people enserfing themselves did so partly to escape the direct taxes on “black” or free peasants, and the enserfing Boyars were to some extent complicit in that – but even so, and even though many peasants were involuntarily enserfed in more direct ways such as by Ukase, there was still some voluntary enserfment. But this is a considerable digression, going into the mechanics of serfdom that TheBaker brought up, and has nothing to do with the acquisition of land qua land under the nascent Feudal System proper; that happened further west and longer ago.