Papers on Capitalism, Development and Planning

Maurice Dobb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415751438
• eBook ISBN: 9781136323980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Economics

This volume consists of lectures and articles by Maurice Dobb selected from among those delivered or written by him during the 1950s and 60s. It includes three lectures delivered at the University of Bologna on 'Some Problems in the History of Capitalism', two lectures on economic development given at the Delhi School of Economics, articles on the theory of development, and a number of articles on various questions of soviet economic planning contributed to specialist journals. The collection ends with a note in retrospect on Marx's Das Kapital published in recognition of the centenary of the appearance of Volume One of that work in 1867.

One Transition from feudalism to capitalism

DOI: 10.4324/9780203120859-1

The question of what was the nature and what were the moving forces of the decline of Feudalism as an economic system, and what connection had this decline with the birth of modern Capitalism, is not entirely without interest, I think, for many underdeveloped countries today. However, it is in the context, rather, of historical interpretation that I want to deal with this question here. For historical interpretation, at any rate for one that attaches primary importance to distinctive modes of production in defining stages in the historical process, a true understanding of this crucial transition is, I believe, essential. Moreover, without it much in our definition of Capitalism as a mode of production, as well as of its origins, must inevitably remain blurred and unclear.

I should perhaps explain that when I talk about Feudalism, I am not referring to this as a juridical form or set of legal relations; I am speaking of it primarily as a socio-economic system. But in looking at it in this light, I do not wish to identify it with Schmoller’s ‘natural economy’, even if it be true that trade and money-dealings (certainly long-distance trade) occupied a smaller place in this type of economy than in others, both preceding and succeeding it. I refer to it as a system under which economic status and authority were associated with land-tenure, and the direct producer (who was himself the holder of some land) was under obligation based on law or customary right to devote a certain quota of his labour or his produce to the benefit of his feudal superior. Regarded in this way, as a system of socio-economic relations, it is almost identical with what we generally mean by serfdom; provided that we do not confine the latter to the performance of direct labour services (on the lord’s estate or in his household) but include in it the provision of tribute or feudal rent in produce or even in a money-form. Using Marc Bloch’s phrase, it implies the existence of ‘a subject peasantry’: he goes on to say, ‘the feudal system meant the rigorous economic subjection of a host of humble folk to a few powerful men … the land itself (being) valued because it enabled a lord to provide himself with “men”’. To which Bloch added: ‘whatever the source of the noble’s income, he always lived on the labour of other men’. Summing it up we can say that the differentiating feature of this type of exploitation is accordingly that the sanction behind it, whereby it is enforced and perpetuated, is so-called ‘extra-economic in some form.

As I see it, there are two central problems connected with the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism—from a system of production resting on serf-labour or ‘a subject peasantry’ to one based on hired wage-labour. These two problems correspond to two phases in the transition, an earlier phase and a later one. Firstly there is the question as to what historical motive-force it was that brought about the disintegration of the feudal system of exploitation, generating a virtual crisis of feudal society at the end of the mediaeval period in Western Europe; certainly in England, in the fifteenth century, and more widely also in France and Germany (vide Marc Bloch’s ‘crise des fortunes seigneuriales’). I would add that this question has to be answered, not only with reference to the unevenness of the process and to differences in the chronological sequence as between different regions, but also in close relation to the so-called ‘second serfdom’—the reinforcement and extension of serfdom, including the imposition of a servile relationship on previously free cultivators, which occurred in parts of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Secondly, there is the question as to the process whereby from this disintegration of Feudalism bourgeois or capitalist methods of production, based on wage-labour, arose. Did these new social relations of production spring up directly from the soil of feudal society, their appearance hastening the decline of the old system and directly supplanting it? Or was the process of burgeoning of Capitalism more complex and more long-drawn-out in time than this?

In considering these questions I must inevitably draw upon English experience since this is what I best know. This limitation has serious disadvantages, as I am well aware. But it has at least one advantage: in that England has always been treated, rightly or wrongly, as the classic case of the rise of Capitalism; and as a result of the Norman Conquest the Feudal System had previously been imposed on England in its most complete form. In connection with the second of the two questions that I have just emphasised, it is to be noted that in this ‘classic’ English case two whole centuries elapsed between the decline of labour services on the lord’s estate as the main form of servile obligation (labour-rent as Marx called it) and the Bourgeois Revolution, and a further century and a half elapsed between the Bourgeois Revolution of the seventeenth century and the coning of the so-called ‘Industrial Revolution’ with power-machinery and factory production. Any answer we give to our second question must take full account of this elongation of the process of transition: must explain why there was so long an interval between the decline of Feudalism and the full maturing of Capitalism. If it were true that ‘more or less complete forms of the capitalist order ripened in the womb of feudal society’ ¹ this long interval would be hard to explain.

¹ As was stated in the Soviet textbook on Political Economy, and ed., p. 59.

The explanation of the decline of Feudalism with which we are commonly confronted (sometimes among ‘Marxist’ writers) is that a system rooted in so-called ‘natural economy’ was undermined, weakened and finally destroyed by the growth of trade and money dealings, which caused labour services to be commuted to a money-rent and encouraged commodity production for a wide market. We find, indeed, this antithesis between ‘natural economy’ and ‘money economy’, and the dissolvent influence of the latter upon the former, in the work of Gustav Schmoller and his school. Pirenne was to elaborate this into the view that it was the revival of long-distance trade from the twelfth century onwards, as a result of the revival of Mediterranean trade, that broke down the self-sufficient manorial economy of feudal Europe. The spread of commerce encouraged the demand among the aristocracy for imported luxuries; merchant caravans, forming permanent settlements at key points, stimulated a revival of town life and market exchange; feudal estates themselves were encouraged by the proximity of markets and of a thriving exchange to produce a surplus for sale outside the locality (whether a surplus of rural produce or of handicrafts), and feudal lords themselves became increasingly reliant on trade and on the obtaining of a money income. In his discussion with me in the pages of the American journal Science and Society, some ten years ago, Dr Paul Sweezy was evidently basing his own position on this conception of Henri Pirenne.

The picture we get is, accordingly, one of trade as the primary solvent of feudal society: of trade operating on the feudal system of production and exploitation as an external force. As regards its internal structure, Feudalism tends to be regarded in this conception as an essentially stable system, which, but for this historical ‘accident’ of the revival of long-distance trade, might have continued indefinitely long.

Once, according to this view, trade and ‘money economy’ have become enthroned as the historical destroyers of Feudalism it is easy enough to regard them as the direct begetters of Capitalism. Here merchant capital plays the essential progenitive role. From the accumulated profits of expanding trade small capitals grow to become large capitals. Some of this capital, originating in the sphere of commerce, flows over first into the purchase of land and then into production—into the employment of free wage-labour in production. Thus the Soviet textbook of which I spoke a moment or two ago (and imitating it a recent volume edited by Otto Kuusinen) speaks of capitalist ‘manufactories’ (i.e. large handicraft workshops employing wage-labour) competing with and ousting the old craft guilds as being the crucial link—the form in which the metamorphosis of merchant capital into industrial capital was realised. Others (and I think this was essentially Sweezy’s view) have seen the ‘putting-out’ system, or Verlag-System, organised by large merchants of the towns to employ craftsmen scattered in domestic workshops in the villages or suburbs, as the crucial road of transition to the matured factory system of the ‘industrial revolution’.

There is much that can be shown, I believe, to be unsatisfactory about this view. Firstly, there is the difficulty I have mentioned about explaining the chronology of the process: if the process of transformation was as simple and direct as this conception represents it as being, why was not the transformation, once it had started, completed in a much shorter time—in the English case within one or two centuries instead of four or five? Secondly, the counterposing of ‘money economy’ and ‘natural economy’ as the direct antinomy responsible for the dissolution of Feudalism is not only far too abstract a formulation, but it ignores (partly if not wholly) the influence of internal contradictions and conflicts on the feudal mode of production, for example the peasant struggles and revolts (in a variety of forms) which were virtually endemic in the centuries of its decline. Moreover, it ignores the fact that the existence of trade and of production for the market were by no means always inconsistent with serfdom as a labour-system; and increase of trade and money dealings far from uniformly acted as a dissolvent of serfdom, even in the form of direct labour services on the lord’s demesne. On the contrary, growth of trade was not infrequently accompanied by an actual intensification of serfdom, as the ‘second serfdom’ east of the Elbe, of which Friedrich Engels spoke, is witness. Even within England itself it was in the relatively backward north and west of England that direct labour services disappeared earliest, while in the more advanced southeast, close to town markets and ports such as London, labour services were most stubborn in survival; and it was in the thirteenth century when agricultural production for the market was at its highest for some centuries that labour services increased.

Reflection on this and on the situation in Eastern Europe, where intensification of serfdom was associated with the growth of export trade in grain, led me to go so far as to declare in my discussion with Dr Sweezy that in many parts of Europe ‘the correlation was not between nearness to markets and feudal disintegration, but between nearness to markets and strengthening of serfdom’. I should mention, perhaps, that the late Professor Kosminsky summed up the matter more concretely by stating that ‘the development of exchange in the peasant economy, whether it served the local market directly, or more distant markets through merchant middlemen, led to the development of money-rent. The development of exchange in the lords’ economy, on the other hand, led to the growth of labour services.’

Thirdly, the conception of Merchant Capital growing up in the interstices of feudal society, and then evolving directly into Industrial Capital and becoming the pioneer of the new mode of production based on wage-labour is, I suggest, not only a gross oversimplification (for example, in its treatment of Merchant Capital as a homogeneous entity), but stands in direct conflict, again, with many of the facts concerning the actual role of the big merchant companies and merchant princes of the time. This conception of the essentially progressive role of Merchant Capital in the transition is difficult to square with the actual social alignments at the time of the Bourgeois Revolution. Far from being uniformly progressive, the larger merchant families were often found in alliance with the feudal ruling class (on whom, indeed, they often relied for their trading privileges as well as for their custom), and the powerful trading companies and guilds (especially those engaged in the export trade) often, in defence of their own monopolistic rights, pursued policies which brought them into conflict with those who were interested in the development of handicraft industry (e.g. the conflict between wool merchants and cloth-workers in England), and which hampered the growth of the latter. Moreover, it quite overlooks the important role, both in the economic transition and in the Bourgeois Revolution, of what one may call the ‘democratic element’ (as they were initially)—of the ‘small men’ who rose from the ranks of the petty producers themselves, alike in agriculture and in the handicrafts, who accumulated capital from small beginnings, battled for independence, later for dominance in the guilds and companies of the period, and also in town government, and became employers of wage-labour because having no stake in feudal society and no claim upon servile labour, they had nothing else but ‘free labour’ to draw upon.

There is, I believe, a fertile misconception associated with the idea that growth of trade necessarily leads to Capitalism_ namely the idea that the presence of a bourgeois element in society (in the sense of persons using money-capital in trade) implies the presence of bourgeois methods and relations of production. As soon as one reflects upon the matter, it becomes clear that nothing could be more mistaken. All societies since the very primitive have been characterised by trade. Classical society is an example of this; and historians have now discovered that even in the heyday of the mediaeval period there was more trade than was formerly thought. Such trade nourished traders: in other words a social stratum of commercial bourgeoisie. But these were generally remote from production: they were excrescences upon the mode of production, not part of it, and their presence in no way altered the character of this mode of production whatever it might be. (Did not Marx say that ‘merchants’ capital in its supremacy everywhere stands for a system of robbery’ and that ‘in the antique wcrld the effect of commerce and the development of merchants’ capital always result in slave economy’?) Similarly the existence of a trading bourgeoisie in the late mediaeval period, who accumulated capital from the profits of trade and reinvested it as merchant capital, was not inconsistent with the existence of a predominantly feudal mode of production and exploitation. Its existence did not automatically dissolve the latter; nor were the interests of feudal nobility and traders necessarily in conflict with one another. Indeed, feudal seigneurs sometimes themselves engaged in trade (this was particularly true of monasteries), and their sons often went into partnership with merchants while the latter acquired land and titles of gentility. Only if Merchant Capital turned towards production, and sought ways of investing capital in new forms of production, did it serve as an instrument of transition to Capitalism. This is a matter to which we shall return.

Let us go back and consider what was the character of the system of production that formed the basis of feudal society. So far as the serf was attached to the land and had a holding of land from which he derived his own subsistence (as was true of all except household serfs), one can speak of the system of production as being the petty mode of production—individual or family labour with primitive implements on small plots of land. The same was true of handicraft production; and even when this was organised by the lord or his servants in large-scale workshops, production remained individual production with no more than a primitive division of labour and coordination of individual units. There was also, however, the lords’ demesne or manorial estate; and in the heyday of feudalism the surplus labour of the serf took the form of work on this demesne or estate—work which was commonly organised as collective work on a larger scale. This can scarcely I think be embraced within the category of the ‘petty mode of production’.

At a later stage of feudal economy, however, in the degree to which large-scale demesne or estate farming declined, surplus labour took the form of an obligation to deliver part of the produce of the serf’s own holding (to which all or most of his labour-time was now devoted), or else its money-equivalent, to the feudal superior. Feudal exploitation, in other words, took the form of direct appropriation of a surplus product from the petty mode of production. In England this change commonly took the form of commuting labour service for a money-rent (often apparently with retention of the right to reconvert it into direct labour services at the lord’s behest). The change, in other words, represented a transition from what Marx termed labour-rent to money-rent; but the latter was still a feudal rent, enforced by feudal law or custom, and not a contractual rent deriving in any sense from a free market in land. It is true, of course, that this implied the presence of a market and some element of money economy; and one result (though not an invariable result) of the spread of trade, as we have seen, was to encourage the change to money-rent. In France, however, the sixteenth century witnessed a growth of rent-in-kind or product-rent on a basis which anticipated the metayage system. In Asiatic forms of feudalism (for example, in India and in Japan) it may be noted that produce-rent or tribute was for centuries a predominant form of exaction.

Marx called money-rent, ‘as a converted form of rent in kind’, ‘the last form and the dissolving form’ of feudal rent. (In its further development,’ he says, ‘money-rent must lead … either to the transformation of land into independent peasants’ property or into the form corresponding to … rent paid by a capitalist tenant.’) Evidently it is most likely to be a ‘dissolving’ and transitional form if the commutation of services into money-rent is achieved as a concession by the lord to pressure from the producer. This was widely true of the spread of commutation in England after 1300 and even of parts of France and Flanders after the Hundred Years War. Marc Bloch has said that ‘to the eyes of the historian … agrarian revolt appeared as inseparable from the seigneurial regime as is, for example, the strike from large-scale capitalist enterprise’ ; and an English mediaeval historian, Rodney Hilton, in a study of ‘Peasant Movements in England before 1381’, has stated that ‘peasant resistance to seigneurial pressure seems first to become significant in England in the thirteenth century’, after which it seems to have increased both in frequency and in intensity. One form assumed by peasant resistance to feudal exaction was peasant flight from the land—flight into the towns or to the waste or borderlands, and on the continent of Europe into the forests or migration towards the less populated east. Such movements drained the estates of labour, and was a powerful factor in promoting commutation and encouraging the actual leasing of demesne lands. In this respect small estates were apt to react differently from large, since the former tended to be less well supplied with labour in the first place as well as possessing less power to assert their claims or to bring back fugitive serfs. It seems to have been this kind of situation which underlay what has been called the general crisis of feudal society in Western Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and it was the verdict of the late Professor Kosminsky (in his contribution to Studi in Onore di Armando Sapori) that it was not a decline of population ‘but rather the liquidation of the seignorial economy, commutation and diminution of feudal rent’ that underlay the economic decline of this period—a decline and crisis of feudal economy which had as the other side of the medal an ‘improvement in the situation of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Transition from feudalism to capitalism
• 2 Prelude to the Industrial Revolution
• 3 Some features of capitalism since the First World War
• 1 Economic development and its momentum under capitalism
• 2 Some problems of industrialisation in agricultural countries
• 1 The discussions of the ‘twenties on planning and economic growth
• 2 The revival of theoretical discussion among Soviet economists
• 3 A comment on the discussion about price-policy
• 4 Soviet price-policy: a review
• 5 Some further comments on the discussion about socialist price-policy
• 6 Soviet transport: a review
• 7 Notes on recent economic discussion
• 8 Kantorovitch on optimal planning and prices
• 6 Introduction to an Italian edition of Capital
• Index