Re: Max Weber's Genteel Racism (was Re:weber)

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Charles wrote:
> What is the comparison of the bourgeois class in feudal Spain and feudal
> England ? Don't these theories on the derivation of capitalism out of
> feudalism have to pay important attention to the bourgeoisie, who were a
> partially oppressed class in feudalism ? I hear a lot of discussion of
> landlords and tenant farmers, and peasants, but little of the bourgeoisie.

The enclosure movement in England helped convert feudal-style lords into
bourgeois land-owners (or rather, changed the property relations so that
bourgeois laws applied), so that industrial or full-blown capitalism
(M-C-M') prevailed there first. The urban bourgeoisie was relatively small
under feudalism. Much of it was involved in merchant or money-lending
capitalism, which are incomplete versions of industrial capitalism that
were dependent on other modes of exploitation. When a proletariat arose in
the countryside, this helped to allow industrial capitalism in the cities
(often in small ones, where guild restrictions did not apply). The
agricultural revolution also helped to feed the urban proletariat.

> Seems the presumptiive ( rebuttable , of course) theory should be
> something like the bourgeoisie/capitalists of capitalism derived from the
> bourgeoisie/small fry of feudalism and their struggle with the feudal
> ruling class ( of course with complications from peasant class struggles
> intertwined).

Of course there were struggles, but a lot of the sons of old-style
landlords became new-style capitalist landlords. The class struggle between
the old feudal ruling class and the rising bourgeoisie was quantitatively
different from that described by Marx and Engels between the bourgeoisie
and the proletariat, since replacing one ruling class with another is so
different from the movement toward the abolition of classes.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine