George Novack on the second serfdom

["Richard Fidler" <rfidler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>Mac Stainsby asked about the political consequences of the Brenner thesis.<<

That's a question many on this list must be asking.

Lou's response to Mac's question was either a very clumsy attempt at irony or
simply another instance of misplaced phlegm. It certainly merited the ridicule
Yoshie gave it.

What is being debated has implications that go far beyond the issue of how
feudalism gave way to capitalism, or whether slavery in the Western Hemisphere
was "capitalist" - important as those questions are to Marxist theory

I posted George Novack's piece on A.G. Frank and the "development of
under-development" in part because Novack puts these issues in a highly relevant
framework. He notes how capitalism has appropriated and used precapitalist
social relations. But he also draws attention to the importance of understanding
the impact of those precapitalist social relations for revolutionary theory. As
Novack notes, "Frank's theory cannot explain why the agrarian question, which is
one of the vestiges of feudalism or the slave system, plays so central a role in
the contemporary revolutionary process."

Here is another piece by Novack that illustrates how the debate on the
transition from feudalism to capitalism impacted on revolutionary strategy among
Russian and eastern European Marxists. Like the earlier excerpt, it predates
Brenner's writings. But it addresses many of the key issues being discussed on
this list.

I have broken it into two parts to conform to our post limits.

The 'Second Serfdom' in Central and Eastern Europe
from Intercontinental Press (New York), March 12, 1973, p. 280

by George Novack

The transition from one social formation to the next brings forth a variety of
anomalous phenomena in which features belonging to an earlier, more primitive
stage of development are fused with those representative of the new order in the
making. These extremely contradictory forms grow out of the operation of the law
of uneven and combined development.

Such hybrid forms necessarily appear because the superior economy remains
attached to the inferior conditions of labor until it acquires strength enough
to stand firmly upon its own productive foundations and let loose its full
energy. Before it becomes autonomous, the new stage of economic organization
grows at the expense of its predecessors but in reliance upon them.

This law of the historical process asserted itself with great vigor during the
rise of capitalism from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The
commingling of capitalist relations with precapitalist forms characterizes this
epoch on a world scale. The expansion of capitalism not only displaced,
disintegrated, and destroyed precapitalist arrangements, but penetrated,
annexed, impregnated, and merged with them, creating a wealth of paradoxical
economic, social, and political institutions that had a combined character.[1]

In the Americas, the Western Europeans from the Spanish to the English implanted
and fostered chattel slavery, which had been unknown until the time of Columbus.
This type of labor exploitation, installed to grow such staple crops as sugar
and tobacco for the widening world market, amalgamated the most rudimentary mode
of class production with the most advanced commercial relations of that era.

The nature of slavery itself was transformed. In its archaic patriarchal form,
slavery was the pedestal of a self-contained natural economy producing use
values for the master's family estate. In the New World, from the start it was a
subordinate branch of the developing capitalist system, producing commodities
for its commerce.

Marx explained the effects of such combinations of the new and the old upon the
direct producers in _Capital_ when he discussed "the greed for surplus labor"
among the owners of the means of production. "As soon as people whose production
still moves within the lower forms of slave-labor, corvée labor, etc., are drawn
into the whirlpool of an international market dominated by the capitalistic mode
of production, the sale of their products for export becoming their principal
interest, the civilised horrors of overwork are grafted on the barbaric horrors
of slavery, serfdom, etc."[2]

At the same time that this "werewolf's hunger for surplus labor" was taking hold
in the Americas, a parallel phenomenon emerged in Central and Eastern Europe.
Under the pressure of West European commerce, the agrarian relations in that
backward area of the continent were transformed. But the result of the
infiltration of trading relations with the West into the old order and their
melding with a lower form of labor was very different in content and
consequences from that across the ocean.

Whereas previously nonexistent modes of exploitation, notably chattel-slave and
feudal relations, were introduced and imposed by the European conquerors and
settlers in North and South America, the indigenous rulers and large property
owners of Central and Eastern Europe, avid for monetary gain, extended and
intensified serfdom in the most brutal and thoroughgoing fashion. This product
of uneven and combined development was analyzed in various connections by Marx
and Engels, who designated it as "the second edition of serfdom."

A collection of articles dealing with this historical phenomenon entitled "Le
Deuxième Servage en Europe Centrale et Orientale" was issued by Recherches
Internationales à la Lumière du Marxisme, Numbers 63-64, 1970, with a foreword
by the French Communist historians Antoine Casanova and Charles Parain. It can
be obtained through Les Editions de la Nouvelle Critique, 29, rue du
4-Septembre, Paris 2. Many of my references to this topic, which has been
debated by scholars for the past hundred years, are taken from the studies by
Soviet and East European authorities translated for this symposium.

>From the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, Western Europe was the 
>birthplace
and remained the center of world capitalism. The preconditions for its
origination there, rather than elsewhere, were rooted in the exceptionally high
degree of development of the potentialities of feudal society and culture. The
artisans and merchants of the medieval towns and cities, especially those
carrying on extensive trade, developed the productive forces that provided the
starting points and set free the elements for promoting the manufactures,
overseas commerce, home market, and collateral economic processes that enriched
the bourgeoisie and undermined the feudal regime.

England presented the perfected model of the primordial transition from feudal
to capitalist conditions. As early as the last part of the fourteenth century,
serfs had been converted into independent yeomen and landless cottagers on that
island. Later the demands of the bourgeoisie for wool for the manufacture of
fabrics led to driving the peasants from the land, which was taken over for
sheep raising. The dispossession of the rural cultivators benefited all sections
of the ruling classes, who were aided by a powerful and centralized monarchical
state. The evictions gave the landed proprietors the necessary supply of
agricultural labourers for capitalist farming on a large scale, in which the
city bourgeoisie also invested its accumulated wealth. They placed levies of
wage workers at the disposal of the capitalist manufacturers in the cities and
countryside and provided sailors and soldiers for navigation and the armed
forces of the kingdom.

A bourgeoisified aristocracy, the "gentry," replaced the old aristocracy which
had been exterminated in the War of the Roses. This new nobility came to live,
not upon feudal tribute, but upon capitalist money rent derived from its
agricultural enterprises. Thanks to their common economic interests, they
coexisted politically in close alliance with the rising bourgeois forces. This
reconstruction of its economy enabled England to build its colonial empire and
achieve domination of the world market, first in trade, afterwards in industry.

During this same period the regions of Central and Eastern Europe, including
Germany, especially east of the Elbe, experienced another path of development,
which gave birth to very different economic, social, and political forms. Social
relations in general, and feudalism in particular, which lasted with
modifications throughout Europe until the end of the eighteenth century, were
far less developed in that part of the continent than in the West. The state
power, though autocratic, was relatively weak in relation to the nobility. Until
the sixteenth century the peasants had managed to retain or regain communal
rights to the land in the villages (the mir and the mark) and kept family
possession of their allotments. They owed tolerable obligations as tenants of
the landed proprietors, and enjoyed considerable acquired personal rights. The
lords of the manor did not feel an overwhelming urge to turn from brigandage,
compete with the patrician bourgeoisie, and amass monetary wealth by selling
sizable amounts of surplus produce from their domains.

The feudal mode of production pivots around the payment of tribute in diverse
forms to the liege-lord by the direct producers (serfs or peasants). The first
edition of feudalism, like patriarchal slavery, was based upon the supremacy of
a natural economy in which the feudal domain was a self-sufficient whole. Most
of the agricultural output was consumed by the people living on the estate and
only a small surplus was exchanged or sold on the nearby market.

While the cultivators were attached to the land, this tie endowed them with that
indispensable means of production. They owed fealty to their lord and paid their
dues to him in kind or in labor. The serf or peasant worked the soil on an
extremely low level of traditional technique, using the crudest implements.
However ample the lord's holdings, they were cultivated by a multiplicity of
small farming units. Under these conditions the amount of surplus labor
extracted from the free peasants or bondsmen was circumscribed. The weakening of
the feudal dependence of the peasantry in many places during the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries further eased their situation.

The entry of capitalist influences from the end of the fifteenth century on
changed this situation from top to bottom. The increased demand for agricultural
products by Holland, England, Scandinavia, and other countries, coinciding with
a revolutionary rise in prices that doubled and tripled the price of commodities
in the sixteenth century, impelled the nobles in Central and Eastern Europe to
embark on a new course. They strove to enlarge their domains, deprive the
peasants of their family and communal lands and rights, and intensify serf
corvée labor in order to export large quantities of grain and other agricultural
products abroad, maintain their extravagant courtly style of living, and buy new
articles of consumption to vie with the wealthy merchants.

The lords of the land became transformed from feudal barons into entrepreneurs
engaging in large-scale undertakings of the commercial type. For this kind of
exploitation they required greater territory and more forced labor. So they
proceeded to acquire both of these necessary means of production at the
peasants' expense.

In various ways and by devious means free peasants were ousted from their
allotments of land, which were amalgamated with the lords' domains. The
cultivators were converted from tenants, owing payment in kind or money to the
seigneur, into full-fledged serfs. Their corvée labor became the basis of this
second edition of serfdom. This type of tribute that had formerly been minor
became major.

Corvée in general comprised obligatory services of an economic, social, or
military kind rendered to a lord or a king. More precisely, it was the labor
performed by the vassals, not for themselves on their own land, but for the lord
on his portion of the manorial demesne. The peasant had to divide his working
week between labor on his own fields and labor on the lord's land.

Labor rent (corvée), rent in kind (in agricultural or artisan products), and
money rent were the three successive forms of feudal rent. As the peasants lost
their rights and autonomy and fell under the unrestrained sway of the lord, the
more developed forms of supplementary imposed labor, realized in kind or in
money, were replaced by the most elementary form. In reverting to personal
servitude the serf became subjected to the most brutal exploitation under the
corvée. Work for the lord rather than for his own account took up a larger and
larger part of the year. It rose from two to three to four days a week until the
grasping lord claimed there was no limit to the obligations he could exact from
his tenants.

As the corvée gained control over social production, the whole existence of the
cultivators changed for the worse. At its extreme the serf was no better than a
slave. He could be bought and sold like a chattel with or without the land,
which was not customary in earlier centuries. Although corvée labor had existed
from the beginning of feudalism (serfdom in fact sprang out of the corvée), it
was not so harsh and omnivorous until the landed proprietors, their lust for
gain incited by the prospects of export trade, "grafted the horrors of civilized
overwork" upon this type of labor. Overwork took the form of more days of labor
for the lord.

The Belgian historian Pirenne thus describes the result of these arbitrary
measures: "The descendants of the free colonists of the thirteenth century were
systematically deprived of their land and reduced to the position of personal
serfs (Leibeigene). The wholesale exploitation of estates absorbed their
holdings and reduced them to a servile condition which so closely approximated
to that of slavery that it was permissible to sell the person of the serf
independently of the soil. From the middle of the sixteenth century the whole of
the region to the east of the Elbe and the Sudeten mountains became covered with
Rittergüter exploited by Junkers, who may be compared, as regards the degree of
humanity displayed in their treatment of their white slaves, with the planters
of the West Indies."[3]

These developments greatly augmented the wealth and power of the landed
nobility, which concentrated economic, juridical, and clerical functions in
their hands, giving them virtually total command over the lives and minds of
their bondsmen.

This intensified oppression and robbery by the landlords was fiercely resented
and contested by the peasants, who rose time and again in insurrection. Their
resistance, which was spread out for more than a century from the Peasants War
in Germany of the early sixteenth century to the Thirty Years War, was
pitilessly crushed. The defeat of the peasant insurgency sealed the fate of the
rural toilers, leaving them in a state of helpless servitude. Except for some
"free" villages surviving in protected pockets here and there, the subjugated
village communities disintegrated and disappeared. Thus the second edition of
serfdom was consolidated on the expropriation and coercion of the peasantry,
just as serfdom was instituted in Latin America on the forced labor of the
aboriginal population, and slavery on the importation and bondage of the African
peoples.

The second serfdom, oriented to the production of commodities for the
international market, was not a mere replica of the first, which was based on
the growing and making of products for local consumption. It was a reversion in
form but not of substance. Whereas the serfs originally created use values
according to custom, the overworked bondsmen of the new dispensation had to
produce more and more exchange values. Far from reproducing the pristine state
of affairs, the second serfdom was a novel combination with dual
characteristics, imposed by the higher laws of social development that forcibly
merged an old mode of production with a new form of exchange.

The second serfdom, whereby the surplus agricultural product entered the
European market, was a product of the uneven development of capitalism in its
rise and feudalism in its decline. It was a specific phenomenon that could take
root and flourish only in essentially backward agrarian countries with an
underdeveloped social division of labor and a dispersed rural population,
lacking a strong central authority or thriving commercial centers to which the
peasants and serfs could flee and be absorbed. Such a feudalized society in
Eastern Europe was suitable for economic annexation by the more advanced
countries of Western Europe with a high degree of commodity production,
exchange, and monetary relations.

Capitalism preserves and uses for its own purposes all forms of labor, provided
they remain subordinate to its mastery. The combination of capitalist relations
with precapitalist methods of production that took place on all continents
during the transition from feudalism to capitalism presupposed the coexistence
of social formations on disparate levels of historical development. This was not
an unprecedented phenomenon. After all, feudalism itself had originated as a
composite of the decayed remains of Roman civilization and Germanic barbarism
integrated with the technological innovations, particularly in agriculture, of
the early Middle Age.

So the North American Indian trappers living in collective tribal conditions
hunted and exchanged their skins and furs for goods, firearms, whiskey, and
money offered by the great trading companies or their factors. In Latin America
the colonial powers and landed aristocrats subjugated native peoples and reduced
them to serfdom, instituting feudal relations of production and forms of
ownership in the service of mercantile and money-lending capital, Such hybrids
are inevitable when backward societies come under the sway of higher ones,
wherever, that is, disproportionate historical and social development is present
and active.

Similar crossbreeds arose in industry as well as agriculture. Whereas
manufacture, the primary stage of capitalist industry, was carried on in Western
Europe in cottage industry or by wage labor, in the Russia of the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries many manufacturing enterprises employed serf labor.
Indeed, as Trotsky pointed out, "The landlords who owned factories were the
first among their caste to favor replacing serfdom by wage-labor."[4]

Notes:

1. See Understanding History - Marxist Essays by George Novack, pp. 82-159, for
a more extensive theoretical exposition of this process.
2. Capital, Vol. 1, International Publishers, New York, 1967, p. 236.
3. A History of Europe from the Invasions to the XVI Century, New York, 1939, p.
534. (Quoted from The Transition From Feudalism to Capitalism, a symposium, by
Paul Sweezy, Maurice Dobb, H. K. Takahashi, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill.
Science & Society, New York, 1967.)
4. History of the Russian Revolution, p. 8.

Richard Fidler
rfidler@xxxxxxxxxx