The ABC’s of Communism Bolshevism 2011

Jason W. Smith, Ph.D.

 

Chapter 11: The Stage of Feudalism

Scientifically defined, Feudalism as a Stage is a half-way house between chattel and wage slavery. Thus, while the General Contradiction of the Slave Stage continues - which is the General Contradiction of all of the Stages of the Servitude Epoch - the General Crisis of Feudalism is that of both the preceding and succeeding Stages (that is, Feudalism features both the General Crisis of Slavery and that of Capitalism.)

Eventually the cost of an increasingly disaffected state apparatus, in the face of rising slave rebellion forces a change in the social order. This happened first in China. But what is key to our understanding is that slavery requires armed thuggery instantly available to keep slaves in a condition of submission and obedience. It necessitates a vicious cruelty as a regular and visible means of terrorizing the slave population into submission and obedience before they revolt. Sadism is now the law of the ideological land (and has been since the Stage of Advanced and Theocratic Chiefdoms), so to speak, and will continue this way throughout the Servitude Epoch.

Yet Slavery produces continuous resistance - continuous slave revolts - and, thus, must continuously be suppressed. This means a large and ever growing army - more and more of it garrisoned to police duties guarding the larger and larger slave pens of the Ancient World. In its most extreme form (e. g., Roman Italy) the entire Italian peninsula was turned into what was essentially one gigantic slave pen - ruled over by a group of extraordinarily rich families and their massive state apparatus (the Legions.)

Feudalism is the result of an historic compromise. The ruling families agree to give a certain amount of freedom to the slave families and to take from them only a given amount of produce and/or labor-power. The specifics vary from place to place, country to country, but the effect is always the same. Slaves have become Serfs and their running away and revolting is reduced.

The rapacity of the ruling families knows no end so eventually the crisis of slavery will reappear and more troops will be needed, and walls will have to be built, to keep peasants in submission and obedience and to prevent them from sneaking away in the night. Nevertheless, Feudalism is always a great historic compromise, granting a minimal amount of freedom to those formerly held as chattel, in exchange for labor peace.

China and Imperial Feudalism

One ruling class, in the ChineseKingdom of Chin (Qin), decided to forge a new way forward. It featured the militarization of the population; its reorganization into a system whereby legal responsibilities to pay what was due the ruling families, were combined with a land redistribution and an adjustment in the system of payments, in kind and cash - which made slaves into small share-cropping farmers and indentured agricultural laborers, able to pay in some cases in cash rather than commodities or time - i.e., slaves became serfs. This new feudal way of life had its own ideology which in China is called Legalism.

Then Chin attacked the other six Kingdoms of nuclear China; in a lightning campaign of several years Chin brought all of them under its heel in 221 B.C. {Ending the Warring States Period [481 -221 BC] with its six major Kingdoms and four smaller ones (including the Kingdom of Chin where full scale military modernization had occurred – including the replacement of bronze weapons with weaponry made of iron and the introduction of cavalry and mounted infantry.)}

Chin’s success marks the beginning of the period of continuous empire that lasted until the 20^th century – at least in form. From that time forward the new social order of Feudalism existed in imperial form in China, until it gradually began to dissolve under the impact of the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1860) and was replaced de facto by capitalism. (Also, this is where the name “China” comes from – i.e., from Chin.)

European Fiefdom Feudalism

In the Mediterranean, the ruling classes were not as far seeing; had no one to bring them feudalism in imperial form. The Roman Empire West collapsed under the persistent impact of massive slave revolts. (“Barbarian” assaults from Russia and East Europe not withstanding – these had been handled for centuries by the Romans but became serious threats only when the Empire was weakened by internal slave revolts, which had tied down the Legions in defending [occupying] different regions of said Empire.)

The resulting patchwork of nearly innumerable fiefs was the political form that Feudalism took in Europe after c. AD 400. As a consequence Europe was always a pitiful, rather pathetic, appendage on the body of Eurasia. That is, when compared to the vast wealth, and advanced science and technology developed in China, where capital was concentrated and centralized and produced in amounts, orders of magnitude, greater than in Europe. The Eurocentric view of the world so common in North America and Europe when viewing the globe over the last two centuries (when the slightly earlier emergence of full scale capitalism gave these “bastions of civilization” the illusion they were the center of the universe) is actually a rather pathetic reflection of the deep underlying ignorance characterizing our people’s understanding of history. This ignorance is the most important product of the “everything important was made in America” propaganda kind of history taught in the Gringo mass media if not in their schools.

China’s Great Wall

As a matter to note, the Great Wall of China, like many similar walls throughout both the New and Old Worlds, was first a series of smaller walls built in China’s long Slave Stage (~3500BC to 221BC) to block “underground railroad” sort of routes to the north thereby keeping runaway slaves within the boundaries of the Kingdoms and later Empire. Only much later, with (1) the emergence of the Mongol threat as an excuse, and (2) the First Emperor’s real need to divert corvee and convict labor out of the hands of his emergent class of eunuch scholar-bureaucrats during the formative years, of Imperial Feudalism, did he convert the pen walls of Servitude China into an equally important bastion of defense. That being the joining of the walls and the creation of one continuous Great Wall across the vast reaches of China’s northern frontier.

The General Crisis of Feudalism, to the degree it may be said to have one of its own, was “the balancing act” the feudal lords had to maintain between the disappearing General Crisis of Slavery and the ascending General Crisis of Capitalism. This was true in both the East and the West of the Old World. This can be expressed with our equation in quadratic form.

- And, as I have said, the Slave Stage Empires of Mesoamerica and the Central Andes were simply overwhelmed by the attack of the Feudalist ronin (unemployed knights) from Iberia. These ronin were successful because of the “clay feet” of the slavocrats. When the masses are slaves, or little better than slaves, it is hard to rally them around the master and mistress classes. – And Cortes had found that intra-class war, such as was occurring when he arrived in Mesoamerica, among the ruling classes, could be used to his advantage politically and militarily. These two factors brought down slavery overnight in the New World.

However, the feudal system was doomed not because of its nature as an historic compromise but because it’s technological base was essentially the same as the Slave Stage Ancient World - in a word, “primitive.” Machinery with independent power to which unskilled, untrained, labor-power could be put to work changed the entire nature of wealth acquisition.