This has meant that when their surplus labour has been appropriated by exploiters, it has been done by what Marx called 'extra economic' means - that is, by means of direct coercion, exercised by landlords or states employing their superior force, their privileged access to military, judicial, and political power. These peasant producers have generally had direct access to the means of their own reproduction and to the land itself.
That division between appropriators and producers has taken many forms, but one common characteristic is that the direct producers have typically been peasants. And probably for nearly as long as they have engaged in agriculture they have been divided into classes, between those who worked the land and those who appropriated the labour of others. It required not a simple extension or expansion of barter and exchange but a complete transformation in the most basic human relations and practices, a rupture in age-old patterns of human interaction with nature.įor millennia, human beings have provided for their material needs by working the land. The most salutary corrective to the naturalization of capitalism and to question-begging assumptions about its origin is the recognition that capitalism, with all its very specific drives of accumulation and profit-maximization, was born not in the city but in the countryside, in a very specific place, and very late in human history.
European feudalism chart how to#
Understanding this transition is important for distinguishing the social property relations that predominate in each period, and thus provide a key for how to orient class struggle. An excerpt from Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Origin of Capitalism, one of the clearest articulations of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
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