EmanuelaBrolandi posted:

Kool. I just reread this book last month

oh yeh? well i just read it for the third time and i can deadlift twice my bodyweight (5 years ago). who's the biggest man now in the Caliban and the Witch thread???

swampman posted:

You can help out by
1. Getting good versions of the images for lazy me

I am happy to scan the images, specifically, and contribute in this way, an achievable goal for me, the overpromiser. (I am also happy to look for the best reproductions of these images from other sources as needed)

Thank you for this thread.

tears posted:

This book looks p interesting but there are some oddities here e.g.:

swampman posted:

Against the Marxist orthodoxy, which explained women’s “oppression” and subordination to men as a residuum of feudal relations

is the authour replying to some particular "marxist orthodoxy" at the time of writing, or to marxism as a whole?

In the context there it's a reference to an orthodoxy that existed in the early 70s at the start of the "wages for housework" movement. I guess in the absence of knowledgable feminists we should dig to find out more about, for example, the roots of dual-systems feminism

What is the authour saying here with "Marx could never have presumed that capitalism paves the way to human liberation had he looked at its history from the viewpoint of women" - that capitalism has not paved the way for human liberation?

A couple of times in the book Federici makes the argument that capitalism was not the logical progression from feudalism, that it did not represent the historical bridge between feudalism and communism. It was imposed via the deliberate, mass terrorizing and persecution of the peasantry, especially women, to force their participation in the new mode of production. Idk if that really answers your question.

glomper_stomper posted:

it was common practice for english working men to sell their wives and children into a form of industrial bondage and collect an even split of the wages between themselves and gang leaders/bosses.

I'm trying not to post excerpts from up ahead, but we get into this in detail in "The Patriarchy of the Wage"; a parallel form of this, geared to fight the local's natural polygamy, was a law in Peru that said a husband and wife could never be apart.. she would accompany him into the silver and mercury mines. women's unwaged labor in both places is used to increase the productivity of waged labor.

swampman posted:

A couple of times in the book Federici makes the argument that capitalism was not the logical progression from feudalism, that it did not represent the historical bridge between feudalism and communism. It was imposed via the deliberate, mass terrorizing and persecution of the peasantry, especially women, to force their participation in the new mode of production.

Beyond its primary narrative about gender, this is one of the best things about C&W (CAW? CAW) to me. I have always struggled with Marx's crypto-evolutionary idea of "stages of history". It strikes me as oddly unscientific - idealistic even - and it's notably turned out to be a significant point of departure in (to take the obvious example) Maoism, at least to the extent of saying the stages aren't universal, that capitalism might be skipped, etc.

But I think the problem is much deeper than just eurocentrism. The early stages are poorly researched caricatures, and as Federici shows, even the development of capitalism is not thoroughly understood. She also shows that the solution to this problem is to continue the application of historical materialism to history, and thereby develop a fuller and more nuanced understanding. I strongly suspect such an understanding would not support any universalist claims about "stages of history". If there was any doubt about this idea being a stain on Marxism generally, consider the breathless transposition of this concept to Marxism itself by proselytising Maoists, who speak of the "stages of development" of Marxism, with Maoism representing a higher stage.

EmanuelaBrolandi posted:

I don't think reading Marx as saying that Capitalism was absolutely necessary before Socialism is really being honest, but rather taking a sensationalist or I guess exaggerated (?) view of his work or acting like his thoughts were static and didn't evolve with time. It's the same regardless of whether it's done to debase his theories or to make dogmatic nominally marxist assertions based on faulty history. Marx was just describing what he saw not saying he was composing the ultimate truth.

I basically agree but the issue isn't what Marx intended, but that Marxists generally have taken his observations and assumptions about development to be part of the science of Marxism, flaws and all. In fact, I think it IS honest to say that Marx made these observations as though he was describing something universal. The exaggeration, as you (correctly) describe it, is really a matter of emphasis. I raise the issue not as an attack on Marx, but a critique of Marxism as it currently exists.

swampman posted:

What is the authour saying here with "Marx could never have presumed that capitalism paves the way to human liberation had he looked at its history from the viewpoint of women" - that capitalism has not paved the way for human liberation?

A couple of times in the book Federici makes the argument that capitalism was not the logical progression from feudalism, that it did not represent the historical bridge between feudalism and communism. It was imposed via the deliberate, mass terrorizing and persecution of the peasantry, especially women, to force their participation in the new mode of production. Idk if that really answers your question.

Yeah so this is what i was thinking the author was getting at. I will be interested to see how the author puts forward this case that capitalism is not a pre-requisit for the establishment of socialism as they seem to be saying: that capitalism as a whole is not nessesary, rather than just the the destruction of the remenants of communalism by capitalism are not nessesary, as Marx and Engels stated in brolandis quote.

having not read the book i will wait until i have read more of the book before saying more.

Have you done what some women are accustomed to do when they fornicate and wish to kill their offspring, act with their maleficia, and their herbs so that they kill or cut the embryo, or, if they have not yet conceived, contrive that they do not conceive? (Noonan 1965: 160)

– it was stipulated that the guilty ones should do penance for ten years; but it was also observed that “it makes a big difference whether she is a poor little woman and acted on account of the difficulty of feeding, or whether she acted to conceal a crime of fornication” (ibid.).

Things changed drastically, however, as soon as womens' control over reproduction seemed to pose a threat to economic and social stability, as it did in the aftermath of the demographic catastrophe produced by the “Black Death,” the apocalyptic plague that, between 1347 and 1352, destroyed more than one third of the European population (Ziegler 1969: 230).

We will see later what role this demographic disaster played in the “labor crisis” of the late Middle Ages. Here we can notice that, after the spread of the plague, the sexual aspects of heresy became more prominent in its persecution, grotesquely distorted in ways that anticipate the later representations of the witches’ Sabbat. By the mid-14ᵗʰ century the Inquisitors’ reports were no longer content with accusing the heretics of sodomy and sexual license. Now heretics were accused of animal worship, including the infamous bacium sub cauda (the kiss under the tail), and of indulging in orgiastic rituals, night flights and child sacrifices (Russell 1972). The Inquisitors also reported the existence of a sect of devil-worshippers called Luciferans. Corresponding to this process, which marked the transition from the persecution of heresy to witch-hunting, the figure of the heretic increasingly became that of a woman, so that, by the beginning of the 15ᵗʰ century, the main target of the persecution against heretics became the witch.

This was not the end of the heretic movement, however. Its final consummation came in 1533, with the attempt by the Anabaptists to set up a City of God in the German town of Münster. This was crushed with a blood bath, followed by a wave of merciless reprisals that affected prolerarian struggles all over Europe (Po-chia Hsia 1988a: 51-69).

Until then, neither the fierce persecution nor the demonization of heresy could prevent the dissemination of heretic beliefs. As Antonino di Stefano writes, excommunication, the confiscation of property, torture, death at the stake, the unleashing of crusades against heretics – none of these measures could undermine the “immense vitality and popularity” of the haeretica pravitatis (heretic evil) (di Stefano 1950: 769). “There is not one commune,” wrote James de Vitry at the beginning of the 13ᵗʰ century, “in which heresy does not have its supporters, its defenders and believers.” Even after the 1215 crusade against the Albigensians, that destroyed the Cathars’ strongholds, heresy (together with Islam) remained the main enemy and threat the Church had to face. Its recruits came from all walks of life: the peasantry, the lower ranks of the clergy (who identified with the poor and brought to their struggles the language of the Gospel), the town burghers, and even the lesser nobility. But popular heresy was primarily a lower-class phenomenon. The environment in which it flourished was the rural and urban proletariat: peasants, cobblers, and cloth workers “to whom it preached equality, fomenting their spirit of revolt with prophetic and apocalyptic predictions” (ibid.: 776).

We get a glimpse of the popularity of the heretics from the trials which the Inquisition was still conducting in the 1330s, in the Trento region (Northern Italy), against those who had given hospitality to the Apostolics, when their leader, Fra Dolcino, had passed through the area thirty years before (Orioli 1993: 217-37). At the time of his coming, many doors had opened to give Dolcino and his followers shelter. Again, in 1304, when announcing the coming of a holy reign of poverty and love, Fra Dolcino set up a community among the mountains of the Vercellese (Piedmont); the local peasants, already in revolt against the Bishop of Vercelli, gave him their support (Mornese and Buratti 2000). For three years the Dolcinians resisted the crusades and the blockade the Bishop mounted against them – with women in male attire fighting side by side with men. In the end, they were defeated only by hunger and by the overwhelming superiority of the forces the Church mobilized agamst them (Lea 1961: 615-20; Hilton 973: 108). On the day when the troops amassed by the Bishop of Vercelli finally prevailed upon them, “more than a thousand heretics perished in the flames, or in the river, or by the sword, in the cruelest of deaths.” Dolcino’s companion, Margherita, was slowly burned to death before his eyes because she refused to abjure. Dolcino himself was slowly driven among the mountain roads and gradually torn to pieces, to provide a salutary example to the local population (Lea, 1961: 620).



Urban Struggles

Not only women and men but peasants and urban workers found in the heretic movement a common cause. This commonality of interests among people who could otherwise be assumed to have different concerns and aspirations can be accounted for on several grounds. First, in the Middle Ages, a tight relation existed between city and country. Many burghers were ex-serfs who had moved or fled to the city in the hope of a better life, and, while exercising their arts, continued to work the land, particularly at harvest time. Their thoughts and desires were still profoundly shaped by life in the village and by their continuing relationship to the land. Peasants and urban workers were also brought together by the fact that they were subjected to the same political rulers, since by the 13ᵗʰ century (especially in Northern and Central Italy), the landed nobility and the urban patrician merchants were becoming assimilated, functioning as one power structure. This situation promoted among workers mutual concerns and solidarity. Thus, whenever the peasants rebelled they found beside themselves the artisans and day laborers, as well as the growing mass of the urban poor. This was the case during the peasant revolt in maritime Flanders, which began in 1323 and ended in June 1328, after the King of France and the Flemish nobility defeated the rebels at Cassel in 1327. As David Nicholas writes, “{t}he rebels’ ability to continue the conflict for five years is conceivable only in the light of the city’s involvement” (Nicholas 1992: 213-14). He adds that, by the end of 1324, the peasants in revolt had been joined by the craftsmen at Ypres and Bruges:

Bruges, by now under the control of a weaver and fuller party, took direction of the revolt from the peasants. ...A war of propaganda began, as monks and preachers told the masses that a new era had come and that they were the equals of the aristocrats (ibid.: 213-14).

Another peasant-urban worker alliance was that of the Tuchins, a movement of “bandits” operating in the mountains of Central France, in which artisans joined an organization that was typical of the rural populations (Hilton 1973: 128).

What united peasants and artisans was a common aspiration to the levelling of differences. As Norman Cohn writes, this is evidenced in documents of various kinds:

From the proverbs or the poor that lament that, “The poor man works always, worries and labours and weeps, never laughing from his heart, while the rich man laughs and sings...”

From the miracle plays where it is stated that “...each man ought to have as much property as every other, and we have nothing we can call our own. The great lords have all the property and poor folk have nothing but suffering and adversity...”

From the most widely read satires which denounced that, “Magistrates, provosts, beadles, mayors – nearly all live by robbery. They all batten on the poor, they all want to despoil them. ...The strong robs the weaker.” Or again: “Good working men make wheaten bread but they will never chew it; no, all they get is the siftings from the corn, and from good wine they get nothing but the dregs and from good cloth nothing but the chaff. Everything that is tasty and good goes to the nobles and the clergy. ...” (N. Cohn 1970: 99-100).

These complaints show how deep was the popular resentment against the inequalities that existed between the “big birds” and the “small birds,” the “fat people” and the “lean people,” as rich and poor were referred to in the Florentine political idiom of the 14ᵗʰ century. “Nothing will be well in England until we are of the same condition,” John Ball proclaimed during his drive to organize the 1381 English Peasant Rising (ibid.: 199).

As we have seen, the main expressions of this aspiration to a more egalitarian society were the exaltation of poverty and the communism of goods. But the affirmation of an egalitarian perspective was also reflected in a new attitude towards work, most evident among the heretic sects. On one side, we have a “refusal of work” strategy, such as that adopted by the French Waldenses (the Poor of Lyon), and the members of some conventual orders (Franciscans, Spirituals), who, wishing to be free from mundane cares, relied on begging and community support for their survival. On the other, we have a new valorization of work, particularly manual labor, that achieved its most conscious formulations in the propaganda of the English Lollards, who reminded their followers that “The nobles have beautiful houses, we have only work and hardships, but it is from our work that everything comes” (ibid.; Christie-Murray 1976: 114-15).

Undoubtedly, the appeal to the “value of work” – a novelty in a society dominated by a military class – functioned primarily as a reminder of the arbitrariness of feudal power. But this new awareness also demonstrates the emergence of new sociaI forces that played a crucial role in the downfall of the feudal system.

This valorization of work reflects the formation of an urban proletariat, made up in part of journeymen and apprentices – working under artisan masters, producing for the market – but mostly by waged day-laborers, employed by rich merchants in industries, producing for export. By the turn of the 14ᵗʰ century, in Florence, Siena, and Flanders, concentrations of up to 4,000 of such day-laborers (weavers, fullers, dyers) could be found in the textile industry. For them, life in the city was just a new type of serfdom, this time under the rule of the cloth merchants, who exercised the strictest control over their activities and the most despotic class rule. Urban wage-workers could not form any associations and were even forbidden to meet in any place and for any reason; they could not carry arms or even the tools of their trade; and they could not strike on pain of death (Pirenne 1956: 132). In Florence, they had no civil rights; unlike the journeymen, they were not part of any craft or guild, and they were exposed to the cruelest abuses at the hands of the merchants who, in addition to controlling the town government, ran their private tribunal and, with impunity, spied on them, arrested them, tortured them, and hanged them at the least sign of trouble (Rodolico 1971).

It is among these workers that we find the most extreme forms of social protest and the greatest acceptance of heretic ideas (ibid.: 56-59). Throughout the 14ᵗʰ century, particularly in the Flanders, cloth workers were engaged in constant rebellions against the bishop, the nobility, the merchants, and even the major crafts. At Bruges, when the main crafts gained power in 1348, wool workers continued to rebel against them. At Ghent, in 1335, a revolt by the local bourgeoisie was overtaken by a rebellion of weavers, who tried to establish a “workers’ democracy” based on the suppression of all authorities, except those living by manual labor (Boissonnade 1927: 310-11). Defeated by an impressive coalition of forces (including the prince, the nobility, the clergy, the bourgeoisie), the weavers tried again in 1378, when they succeeded in establishing what (with some exaggeration, perhaps) has been called the first “dictatorship of the proletariat” known in history. Their goal, according to Peter Boissonnade, was “to raise journeymen against masters, wage earners against great entrepreneurs, peasants against lords and clergy. It was said that they had contemplated the extermination of the whole bourgeois class, with the exception of children of six and the same for the nobles” (ibid.: 311). They were defeated only by a battle in the open field, at Roosebecque in 1382, where 26,000 of them lost their lives (ibid.).

The events at Bruges and Ghent were not isolated cases. In Germany and Italy as well, the artisans and laborers rebelled at every possible occasion, forcing the local bourgeoisie to live in a constant state of fear. In Florence, the workers seized power in 1379, led by the Ciompi, the day-laborers in the Florentine textile industry.28 They too established a workers’ government, but it lasted only a few months before being completely defeated by 1382 (Rodolico 1971). The workers at Liege, in the Low Countries, were more successful. In 1384, the nobility and the rich (“the great,” as they were called), incapable of continuing a resistance which had lasted for more than a century, capitulated. From then on, “the crafts completely dominated the town,” becoming the arbiter of the municipal government (Pirenne 1937: 201). The craftsmen had also given support to the peasants in revolt, in maritime Flanders, in a struggle that lasted from 1323 to 1328, which Pirenne describes as “a genuine attempt at a social revolution” (ibid.: 195). Here – according to a Flemish contemporary whose class allegiance is apparent – “the plague of insurrection was such that men became disgusted with life” (ibid.: 196). Thus, from 1320 to 1332, the “good people” of Ypres implored the king not to allow the town’s inner bastions, within which they lived, to be demolished because they protected them from the “common people” (ibid.: 202-03).

(Jaquerie. Peasants took arms in Flanders in 1323, in France in 1358, in England in 1381, in Florence, Ghent and Paris in 1370 and 1380.)



Endnotes

15. (Russell 1972: 136; Lea 1961: 126-27). Also the movement of the Pastoureaux was provoked by events in the East, this time the capture of King Louis IX of France by the Moslems, in Egypt, in 1249 (Hilton 1973: 100-02). A movement made of “humble and simple” people was organized to free him, but it quickly took on an anticlerical character. The Pastoreaux reappeared in Southern France in the spring and summer of 1320, still “directly influenced by the crusading atmosphere. ...{They} had no chance of crusading in the east; instead, they spent their energies on attacking the Jewish communities of south-west France, Navarre and Aragon, often with the complicity of local consulates, before being wiped out or dispelled by royal officials” (Barber 1992: 135-36).

16. The Crusade against the Albigensians (Cathars from the town of Albi, in southern France) was the first large-scale attack against the heretics, and the first Crusade against Europeans. Pope Innocent III launched it in the regions of Toulouse and Montpellier after 1209. In its wake, the persecution of heretics dramatically intensified. In 1215, on the occasion of the fourth Lateran council, Innocent III inserted in the council’s canons a set of measures that condemned heretics to exile, to the confiscation of their properties, and excluded them from civil life. Later, in 1224, the emperor Frederick II joined the persecution with the constitution Cum ad conservandum that defined heresy a crime of lesa maiestatis, to be punish with death by fire. In 1229, the Council of Toulouse established that heretics should be identified and punished. Proven heretics and their protectors were to be burned at the stake. The house where a heretic was discovered was to be destroyed, and the land upon which it was built confiscated. Those who reneged their beliefs were to be immuted, while those who relapsed were to suffer the supplice of fire. Then, in 1231-1233, Gregorio IX instituted a special tribunal with the specific function of eradicating heresy: the Inquisition. In 1252, Pope Innocent IV, with the consensus of the main theologians of the time, authorized the use of torture against heretics (Vauchez 1990: 163, 164, 165).

17. André Vauchez attributes the “success” of the Inquisition to its procedure. The arrest of suspects was prepared with utmost secrecy. At first, the persecution consisted of raids against heretics’ meetings, organized in collaboration with public authorities. Later, when Waldens and Cathars had already been forced to go underground, suspects were called in front of a tribunal without being told the reasons for their convocation. The same secrecy characterized the investigative process. The defendants were not told the charges moved against them, and those who denounced them were allowed to maintain their anonymity. Suspects were released, if they informed against their accomplices and promised to keep silent about their confessions. Thus, when heretics were arrested they could never know if anyone from their congregation had spoken against them (Vauchez 1990: 167-168). As Italo Mereu points out, the work of the Roman Inquisition left deep scars in the history of European culture, creating a climate of intolerance and institutional suspicion that continues to corrupt the legal system to this day. The legacy of the Inquisition is a culture of suspicion that relies on anonymous charges and preventive detention, and treats suspects as if already proven guilty (Mereu 1979).

18. Let us recall here Friedrick Engels’ distinction between the heretical beliefs of peasants and artisans, associated with their opposition to feudal authority, and those of the town burghers, that were primarily a protest against the clergy (Engels 1977: 43).

19. The politicization of poverty, together with the rise of a money-economy, brought about a decisive change in the attitude of the Church towards the poor. Until the 13ᵗʰ century, the Church exalted poverty as a holy state and engaged in distributions of alms, trying to convince the rustics to accept their situation and not envy the rich. In Sunday sermons, priests were prodigal with tales like that of the poor Lazarus sitting in heaven at the side of Jesus, and watching his rich but stingy neighbor burning in flames. The exaltation of sancta paupertas (“holy poverty”) also served to impress on the rich the need for charity as a means for salvation. This tactic procured the Church substantial donations of land, buildings and money, presumably to be used for distribution among the needy, and it enabled it to become one of the richest institutions in Europe. But when the poor grew in numbers and the heretics started to challenge the Church’s greed and corruption, the clergy dismissed its homilies about poverty and introduced many “distinguo.” Starting in the 13ᵗʰ century, it affirmed that only voluntary poverty has merit in the eyes of God, as a sign of humility and contempt for material goods; this meant, in practice, that help would now be given only to the “deserving poor,” that is, to the impoverished members of the nobility, and not to those begging in the streets or at city gates. The latter were increasingly looked upon with suspicion as guilty of laziness or fraud.

20. Much controversy took place among the Waldenses on the correct ways of supporting oneself. It was resolved, at the Bergamo Meeting of 1218, with a major split between the two main branches of the movement. The French Waldenses (Poor of Lyon) opted for a life supported by alms, while those of Lombardy decided that one must live out of his/her own labor and proceeded to form workers’ collectives or cooperatives (congregationes laborantium)(di Stefano 1950: 775). The Lombard Waldenses continued to maintain private possessions – houses and other forms of property – and they accepted marriage and the family (Little 1978: 125).

21. Holmes 1975: 202; N. Cohn 1970: 215-17; Hilton 1973: 124. As described by Engels, the Taborites were the revolutionary, democratic wing of the Hussite national liberation movement against the German nobility in Bohemia. Of them, Engels tells us only that “{T}heir demands reflected the desire of the peasantry and the urban lower classes to end all feudal oppression” (Engels 1977: 44n). But their remarkable story is more fully narrated in H. C. Lea’s The Inquisition of the Middle Ages (Lea 1961: 523-40), in which we read that they were peasants and poorfolk, who wanted no nobles or gentlemen in their ranks and had republican tendencies. They were called Taborites because in 1419, when the Hussites in Prague first came under attack, they moved on to Mount Tabor. There they founded a new town, that became a center of both resistance against the Gennan nobility, and experimentation with communism. The story has it that, on arrival from Prague, they put out large open chests in which each was asked to place his/her possessions, so that all things could be held in common. Presumably, this collective arrangement was shortlived, but its spirit lived on longer after its demise (Demetz 1997: 152-157).

The Taborites distinguished themselves from the more moderate Calixtins because they included among their objectives the independence of Bohemia, and the retention of the property which they had confiscated (Lea 1961: 530). They did agree, however, on the four articles of faith that united the Hussite movement in front of its foreign enemies:

I. Free preaching of the Word of God;

II. Communion in ;

III. The abolition of the clergy’s dominion over temporal possessions and its return to the evangelical life of Christ and the apostles;

IV. The punishment of all offenses against divine law without exception of person or condition.

Unity was much needed. To stamp out the revolt of the Hussites, the Church, in 1421, sent against Taborites and Calixtins an army of 150,000. “Five times,” Lea writes, “during 1421, the crusaders invaded Bohemia, and five times they were beaten back.” Two years later, at the Council of Siena, the Church decided that, if the Bohemian heretics could not be defeated militarily, they should be isolated and starved out through a blockade. But that too failed and Hussite ideas continued to spread into Germany, Hungary, and the Slavic territories to the South. Another army of 100,000 was once more launched against them, in 1431, again to no avail. This time the crusaders fled the battlefield even before the battle started, on “hearing the battle hymn of the dreaded Hussite troops” (ibid.).

What, in the end, destroyed the Taborites were the negotiations that took place between the Church and the moderate wing of the Hussites. Cleverly, the ecclesiastic diplomats deepened the split between the Calixtins and the Taborites. Thus, when another crusade was launched against the Hussites, the Calixtins joined the Catholic barons in the pay of the Vatican, and exterminated their brothers at the Battle of Lipan, on May 30, 1434. On that day, more than 13,000 Taborites were left dead on the battlefield.

Women were very active in the Taborite movement as in all heretic movements. Many fought in the battle for Prague in 1420 when 1500 Taborite women dug a long trench which they defended with stones and pitchforks (Demetz 1997).

(John Hus being martyred at Gottlieben on the Rhine in 1413. After his death, his ashes were thrown into the river.)

22. These words – “the most moving plea for social equality in the history of the English language,” according to the historian R. B. Dobson – were actually put into John Ball’s mouth to incriminate him and make him appear like a fool, by a contemporary French chronicler, Jean Froissart, a stern opponent of the English Peasants’ Revolt. The first sentence of the sermon, which John Ball was said to have given many times, (in Lord Berners’ 16ᵗʰ-century translation) is as follows: “Ah, ye good people, matters goeth not well to pass in England, nor shall do till everyting be common, and that there be no villains nor gentlemen, but that we may be united together, and that the lords be no greater masters than we be” (Dobson 1983: 371).

23. By 1210 the Church had labeled the demand for the abolition of the death penalty an heretical “error,” which it attributed to the Waldenses and the Cathars. So strong was the presumption that the opponents of the Church were abolitionists that every heretic who wanted to submit to the Church had to affirm that “the secular power can, withom mortal sin, exercise judgement of blood, provided that it punishes with justice, not out of hatred, with prudence, not precipitation” (Mergiven 1997: 101). As J. J. Mergiven points out, the heretical movement took the moral high ground on this question, and “forced the ‘orthodox,’ ironically, to take up the defense of a very questionable practice” (ibid.: 103).

24. Among the evidence proving the Bogomils’ influence on the Cathars there are two works that “the Cathars of Western Europe took over from the Bogomils.” They are: The Vision of Isaiah and The Secret Supper, cited in Wakefield and Evans’s review of Catharist literature (1969: 447-465).

The Bogomils were for the Eastern Church what the Cathars were for the Western. Aside from their Manicheanism and anti-natalism, the Byzantine authorities were most alarmed by the Bogomils’ “radical anarchism,” civil disobedience, and class hatred. As Presbyter Cosmas wrote, in his sermons against them: “They teach their own people not to obey their masters, they revile the wealthy, hate the king, ridicule the elders, condemn the boyars, regard as vile in the eyes of God those who serve the king, and forbid every serf to work for his lord.” The heresy had a tremendous and long-term influence on the peasantry of the Balkans. “The Bogomils preached in the language of the people, and their message was understood by the people ... their loose organisation, their attractive solution of the problem of evil, and their commitment to social protest made their movement virtually indestructible” (Browning 1975: 164- 166). The influence of the Bogomils on heresy is traceable in the use, common by the 13th century, of “buggery,” to connote first heresy and then homosexuality (Bullough 1976a: 76ff.).

25. The ban which the Church imposed upon clerical marriages and concubinage was motivated, more than by any need to restore its reputation, by the desire to defend its property, which was threatened by too many subdivisions, and by the fear that the wives of the priests might unduly interfere in clerical affairs (McNamara and Wemple 1988: 93-95). The ruling of the Second Lateran Council strengthened a resolution that had already been adopted in the previous century, but had not been observed in the midst of an open revolt against this innovation. The protest had climaxed in 1061 with an “organized rebellion” leading to the election of the Bishop of Parma as Antipope, under the title of Honorious II, and his subsequent, failed attempt to capture Rome (Taylor 1954: 35). The Lateran Council of 1123 not only banned clerical marriages, but declared those existent invalid, throwing the priests families, above all their wives and children, into a state of terror and destitution (Brundage 1987: 214, 216-17).

26. The reforming canons of the 12ᵗʰ century ordered married couples to avoid sex during the three Lenten seasons associated with Easter, Pentacost and Christmas, on every Sunday of the year, on feast days prior to receiving communion, on their wedding nights, during their wife's menstrual periods, during pregnancy, during lactation, and while doing penance (Brundage 1987: 198-99). These restrictions were not new. They were reaffirmations of the ecclesiastic wisdom embodied in dozens of Penitentials. What was novel was that they now became incorporated within the body of Canon Law “which was transformed into an effective instrument for Church government and discipline in the twelfth century.” Both the Church and the laity recognized that a legal requirement with explicit penalties would have a different status than a penance suggested by one’s confessor. In this period, the most intimate relations between people became a matter for lawyers and penologists (Brundage 1987: 578).

27. The relation between the Beguines and heresy is uncertain. While some of their contemporaries, like James de Vitry – described by Carol Neel as “an important ecclesiastical administrator” – supported their initiative as an alternative to heresy, “they were finally condemned on suspicion of heresy by the Council of Vienne of 1312, likely because of the clergy’s intolerance of women who escaped male control. The Beguines subsequently disappeared, “forced out of existence by ecclesiastical reprobation” (Neel 1989: 324-27, 329, 333, 339).

28. The Ciompi were those who washed, combed, and greased the wool so that it could be worked. They were considered unskilled workers and had the lowest social status. “Ciompo” is a derogatory term, meaning dirty and poorly dressed, probably due to the fact that the “ciompi” worked half-naked and were always greasy and stained with dyes. Their revolt began in July 1382, sparked by the news that one of them, Simoncino, had been arrested and tortured. Apparently, under torture he had been made to reveal that the ciompi had held a secret meeting during which, kissing each other on the mouth, they had promised to defend each other from the abuses of their employers. Upon hearing of Simoncino’s arrest, workers rushed to the guild hall of the wool industry (Palazzo dell’ Arte), demanding that their comrade be released. Then, after securing his release, they occupied the guild hall, put patrols on Ponte Vecchio, and hung the insignia of the “minor guilds” (arti minori) from the windows of the guild hall. They also occupied the city hall where they claimed to have found a room full of nooses which, they believed, were meant for them. Seemingly in control of the situation, the ciompi presented a petition demanding that they become part of the government, that they no longer be punished by the cutting of a hand for non-payment of debts, that the rich pay more taxes, and that corporal punishment be replaced by monetary fines. In the first week of August, they formed a militia and set up three new crafts, while preparations were made for an election in which, for the first time, members of the ciompi would participate. Their new power, however, lasted no more than a month, as the wool magnates organized a lock-out that reduced them to hunger. After their defeat, many were arrested, hung and decapitated; many more had to leave the city in an exodus that marked the beginning of the decline of the wool industry in Florence (Rodolico 1971: passim).

The peasants are too rich ... and do not know what obedience means; they don't take law into any account, they wish there were no nobles ... and they would like to decide what rent we should get for our lands (ibid.: 33).

In response to the increased cost of labor and the collapse of the feudal rent, various attempts were made to increase the exploitation of work, either through the restoration of labor services or, in some cases, the revival of slavery. In Florence, the importation of slaves was authorized in 1366.29 But such measures only sharpened the class conflict. In England, it was an attempt by the nobility to contain the cost of labor, by means of a Labor Statute limiting the maximum wage, that caused the Peasant Rising of 1381. This spread from region to region and ended with thousands of peasants marching from Kent to London “to talk to the king” (Hilton 1973; Dobson 1983). Also in France, between 1379 and 1382, there was a “whirlwind of revolution” (Boissonnade 1927: 314). Proletarian insurrections exploded at Berier, where forty weavers and cord-wainers were hanged. In Montpellier the workers in revolt proclaimed that “by Christmas we will sell Christian flesh at six pence a pound.” Revolts broke out in Carcassone, Orleans, Amiens, Tournai, Rouen and finally in Paris, where in 1413 a “workers’ democracy” came into power.30 In Italy the most important revolt was that of the Ciompi. lt began in July of 1382, when cloth-workers in Florence for a time forced the bourgeoisie to give them a share of government and declare a moratorium on all debts incurred by wage earners; they then proclaimed what, in essence, was a dictatorship of the proletariat (“God's people”), though one soon crushed by the combined forces of the nobility and the bourgeoisie (Rodolico 1971).

“Now is the time” – the sentence that recurs in the letters of John Ball - well illustrates the spirit of the European proletariat at the close of the 14ᵗʰ century, a time when, in Florence, the wheel of fortune was beginning to appear on the walls of taverns and work-shops, to symbolize the imminent change of lot.

In the course of this process, the political horizon and the organizational dimensions of the peasant and artisan struggle broadened. Entire regions revolted, forming assemblies and recruiting armies. At times, the peasants organized in bands, attacking the castles of the lords, and destroying the archives where the written marks of their servitude were kept. By the 15ᵗʰ century the confrontation between the peasants and the nobility turned into true wars, like that of the remensas in Spain, that lasted from 1462 to 1486.31 In Germany a cycle of “peasant wars” began in 1476 with the conspiracy led by Hans the Piper. This escalated into four bloody rebellions led by Bundschuch (“Peasant Union”) between 1493 and 1517, and culminating in a full-fledged war that lasted from 1522 to 1525, spreading over four countries (Engels 1977; Blickle 1977).

(The Black Death destroyed one-third of the population of Europe. It was a turning point in European history, socially and politically.)

In all these cases, the rebels did not content themselves with demanding some restrictions to feudal rule, nor did they only bargain for better living conditions. Their aim was to put an end to the power of the lords. As the English peasants declared during the Peasant Rising of 1381, “the old law must be abolished.” Indeed, by the beginning of the 15ᵗʰ century, in England at least, serfdom or villeinage had almost completely disappeared, though the revolt had been politically and militarily defeated and its leaders brutally executed (Titow 1969: 58).

What followed has been described as the “golden age of the European proletariat” (Marx 1909, Vol. I; Braudel 1967: 128ff.), a far cry from the canonic representation of the 15ᵗʰ century, which has been iconographically immortalized as a world under the spell of the dance of death and memento mori.

Thorold Rogers has painted a utopian image of this period in his famous study of wages and living conditions in medieval England. “At no time,” Rogers wrote, “were wages {in England} so high and food so cheap” (Rogers 1894: 326ff). Workers sometimes were paid for every day of the year, although on Sunday and the main holidays they did not work. They were also fed by their employers, and were paid a viaticum for coming and going from home to work, at so much per mile of distance. In addition, they demanded to be paid in money, and wanted to work only five days a week.

As we shall see, there are reasons to be skeptical about the extent of this cornucopia. However, for a broad section of the western European peasantry, and for urban workers, the 15ᵗʰ century was a period of unprecedented power. Not only did the scarcity of labor give them the upper hand, but the spectacle of employers competing for their services strengthened their sense of self-value, and erased centuries of degradation and subservience. The ‘scandal’ of the high wages the workers demanded was only matched, in the eyes of the employers, by the new arrogance they displayed - their refusal to work, or to continue to work after having satisfied their needs (which they now could do more quickly because of their higher wages); their stubborn determination to hire themselves out only for limited tasks, rather than for prolonged periods of time; their demands for other perks beside their wages; and their ostentatious clothing which, according to the complaints of contemporary social critics, made them indistinguishable from the lords. “Servants are now masters and masters are servants,” complained John Gower in Mirour de l’omme (1378), “the peasant pretends to imitate the ways of the freeman, and gives himself the appearance of him in his clothes” (Hatcher 1994: 17).

The condition of the landless also improved after the Black Death (Hatcher 1994). This was not just an English phenomenon. In 1348 the canons of Normandy complained that they could not find anyone to cultivate their lands who did not ask for more than what six servants had earned at the beginning of the century. Wages doubled and trebled in Italy, France and Germany (Boissonnade 1927: 316-20). In the lands of the Rhine and Danube, the daily agricultural wage became equivalent in purchasing power to the price of a pig or sheep, and these wage rates applied to women as well, for the differential between female and male earnings was drastically reduced in the wake of the Black Death.

What this meant for the European proletariat was not only the achievement of a standard of living that remained unparalleled until the 19ᵗʰ century, but the demise of serfdom. By the end of the 14ᵗʰ century land bondage had practically disappeared (Marx 1909, Vol. I: 788). Everywhere serfs were replaced by free farmers – copy holders or lease holders – who would accept work only for a substantial reward.



Sexual Politics, the Rise of the State and Counter-Revolution

However, by the end of the 15ᵗʰ century, a counter-revolution was already under way at every level of social and political life. First, efforts were made by the political authorities to co-opt the youngest and most rebellious male workers, by means of a vicious sexual politics that gave them access to free sex, and turned class antagonism into an antagonism against proletarian women. As Jacques Rossiaud has shown in Medieval Prostitution (1988), in France, the municipal authorities practically decriminalized rape, provided the victims were women of the lower class. In 14ᵗʰ-century Venice, the rape of an unmarried proletarian woman rarely called for more than a slap on the wrist, even in the frequent case in which it involved a group assault (Ruggiero 1989: 91-108). The same was true in most French cities. Here, the gang-rape of proletarian women became a common practice which the perpetrators would carry out openly and loudly at night in groups of two to fifteen, breaking into their victims’ homes, or dragging their victims through the streets, without any attempt to hide or disguise themselves. Those who engaged in these “sports” were young journeymen or domestic servants, and the penniless sons of well-to-do families, while the women targeted were poor girls, working as maids or washerwomen, of whom it was rumored that they were “kept” by their masters (Rossiaud 1988: 22). On average, half of the town male youth, at some point, engaged in these assaults, which Rossiaud describes as a form of class protest, a means for proletarian men – who were forced to postpone marriage for many years because of their economic conditions – to get back “their own,” and take revenge against the rich. But the results were destructive for all workers, as the state-backed raping of poor women undermined the class solidarity that had been achieved in the anti-feudal struggle. Not surprisingly, the authorities viewed the disturbances caused by such policy (the brawls, the presence of youth gangs roaming the streets at night in search of adventure and disturbing the public quiet) as a small price to pay in exchange for a lessening of social tensions, obsessed as they were with the fear of urban insurrections, and the belief that if the poor gained the upper hand they would take their wives and hold them in common (ibid.: 13).

For proletarian women, so cavalierly sacrificed by masters and servants alike, the price to be paid was inestimable. Once raped, they could not easily regain their place in society. Their reputation being destroyed, they would have to leave town or turn to prostitution (ibid.; Ruggiero 1985: 99). But they were not the only ones to suffer. The legalization of rape created a climate of intense misogyny that degraded all women regardless of class. It also desensitized the population to the perpetration of violence against women, preparing the ground for the witch-hunt which began in this same period. It was at the end of the 14ᵗʰ century that the first witch-trials took place, and for the first time the Inquisition recorded the existence of an all-female heresy and sect of devil-worshippers.

(Brothel, from a 15ᵗʰ-century German woodcut. Brothels were seen as a remedy for social protest, heresy, and homosexuality.)

Another aspect of the divisive sexual politics that the princes and municipal authorities pursued to diffuse workers’ protest was the institutionalization of prostitution, implemented through the opening of municipal brothels soon proliferating throughout Europe. Enabled by the contemporary high-wage regime, state-managed prostitution was seen as a useful remedy for the turbulence of proletarian youth, who in “la Grand Maison” – as the state-brothel was called in France – could enjoy a privilege previously reserved for older men (Rossiaud 1988). The municipal brothel was also considered a remedy against homosexuality (Otis 1985), which in several European towns (e.g., Padua and Florence) was widely and publicly practiced, but in the aftermath of the Black Death was beginning to be feared as a cause of depopulation.32

Thus, between 1350-1450, publicly managed, tax-financed brothels were opened in every town and village in Italy and France, in numbers far superior to those reached in the 19ᵗʰ century. Amiens alone had 53 brothels in 1453. In addition, all the restrictions and penalties against prostitution were eliminated. Prostitutes could now solicit their clients in every part of town, even in front of the church during Mass. They were no longer bound to any particular dress codes or the wearing of distinguishing marks, because prostitution was officially recognized as a public service (ibid.: 9-10).

Even the Church came to see prostitution as a legitimate activity. The state-managed brothel was believed to provide an antidote to the orgiastic sexual practices of the heretic sects, and to be a remedy for sodomy, as well as a means to protect family life.

It is difficult retrospectively to tell how far playing the “sex card” helped the state to discipline and divide the medieval proletariat. What is certain is that this sexual “new deal” was part of a broader process which, in response to the intensification of social conflict, led to the centralization of the state, as the only agent capable of confronting the generalization of the struggle and safeguarding the class relation.

In this process, as we will see later in this work, the state became the ultimate manager of class relations, and the supervisor of the reproduction of labor-power – a function it has continued to perfonn to this day. In this capacity, state officers passed laws in many countries that set Iimits to the cost of labor (by fixing the maximum wage), forbid vagrancy (now harshly punished) (Geremek 1985: 61ff), and encouraged workers to reproduce.

Ultimately, the mounting class conflict brought about a new alliance between the bourgeoisie and the nobility, without which proletarian revolts may not have been defeated. It is difficult, in fact, to accept the claim, often made by historians, according to which these struggles had no chance of success due to the narrowness of their political horizons and the “confused nature of their demands.” In reality, the objectives of the peasants and artisans were quite transparent. They demanded that “every man should have as much as another” (Pirenne 1937: 202) and, in order to achieve this goal, they joined with all those “who had nothing to lose,” acting in concert, in different regions, not afraid to confront the well-trained armies of the nobility, despite their lack of military skills.

If they were defeated, it was because all the forces of feudal power – the nobility, the Church, and the bourgeoisie – moved against them united, despite their traditional divisions, by their fear of proletarian rebellion. Indeed, the image that has been handed down to us, of a bourgeoisie perennially at war with the nobility, and carrying on its banners the call for equality and democracy, is a distortion. By the late Middle Ages, wherever we turn, from Tuscany to England and the Low Countries, we find the bourgeoisie already allied with the nobility in the suppression of the lower classes.33 For in the peasants and the democratic weavers and cobblers of its cities, the bourgeoisie recognized an enemy far more dangerous than the nobility – one that made it worthwhile for the burghers even to sacrifice their cherished political autonomy. Thus, it was the urban bourgeoisie, after two centuries of struggles waged in order to gain full sovereignty within the walls of its communes, who reinstituted the power of the nobility, by voluntarily submitting to the rule of the Prince, the first step on the road to the absolute state.



Endnotes

29. In the aftermath of the Black Death, every European country began to condemn idleness, and to persecute vagabondage, begging, and refusal of work. England took the initiative with the Statute of 1349 that condemned high wages and idleness, establishing that those who did not work, and did not have any means of survival, had to accept work. Similar ordinances were issued in France in 1351, when it recommended that people should not give food or hostel to healthy beggars and vagabonds. A further ordinance in 1354 established that those who remained idle, passing their time in taverns, playing dice or begging, had to accept work or face the consequences; first offenders would be put in prison on bread and water, while second offenders would be put in the stocks, and third offenders would be branded on the forehead. In the French legislation a new element appeared that became part of the modern struggle against vagabonds: forced labor. In Castile, an ordinance introduced in 1387 allowed private people to arrest vagabonds and employ them for one month without wages (Geremek 1985: 53-65).

30. The concept of “workers’ democracy” may seem preposterous when applied to these forms of government. But we should consider that in the U.S., which is often viewed as a democratic country, not one industrial worker has yet become President, and the highest governmental organs are all composed of representatives from an economic aristocracy.

31. The remensas was a redemption tax that the servile peasants in Catalonia had to pay to leave their holdings. After the Black Death, peasants subject to the remensas were also subjected to a new taxation known as the “five evil customs” (los malos usos) that, in earlier times, had been applied in a less generalized way (Hilton 1973: 117-18). These new taxes, and the conflicts revolving around the use of abandoned holdings were the source of a protracted, regional war, in the course of which the Catalonian peasants recruited one man from every three households. They also strengthened their ties by means of sworn associations, took decisions at peasant assemblies and, to intimidate the landowners, put up crosses and other threatening signs all over the fields. In the last phase of the war, they demanded the end of rent and the establishment of peasant property rights (ibid.: 120-21; 133).

32. Thus, the proliferation of public brothels was accompanied by a campaign against homosexuals that spread even to Florence, where homosexuality was an important part of the social fabric “attracting males of all ages, matrimonial conditions and social rank.” So popular was homosexuality in Florence that prostitutes used to wear male clothes to attract their customers. Signs of a change in Florence were two initiatives which the authorities introduced in 1403, when the city banned “sodomites” from public office, and set up a watchdog commission devoted to the extirpation of homosexuality: the Office of Decency. But significantly, the main step which the office took was to make preparations for the opening of new public brothel, so that, by 1418, the authorities were still looking for means to eradicate sodomy “from the city and from the county” (Rocke 1997: 30-32, 35). On the Florentine government’s promotion of publicly funded prostitution as a remedy against population decline and “sodomy,” see also Richard C. Trexler (1993).

Like other Italian cities of the fifteenth century, Florence believed that officially sponsored prostitution combatted two other evils of incomparably greater moral and social import: male homosexuality – whose practice was thought to obscure the difference between the sexes and thus all difference and decorum – and the decline in the legitimate population which resulted from an insufficient number of marriages (p. 32).

Trexler poims out that the same correlation between the spread of homosexuality, population decline, and the sponsorship of public prostitution can be found in late fourteenth-century, early fifteenth-century Lucca, Venice and Siena, and that the growth in the number and social power of prostitutes eventually led to a backlash, so that whereas

{i}n the early fifteenth century preachers and statesmen {in Florence} had deeply believed that no city could long endure in which females and males seemed the same … {a} century later {they} wondered if it could survive when {upper} class women could not be distinguished from brothel prostitutes (ibid.: 65).

33. In Tuscany, where the democratization of political life had proceeded further than in any other European region, by the second half of the 15ᵗʰ century, there was an inversion of this tendency and a restoration of the power of the nobility, promoted by the mercantile bourgeoisie to block the rise of the lower classes. By this time, an organic fusion had occurred between the families of the merchants and those of the nobility, achieved by means of marriages and the sharing of prerogatives. This put an end to that social mobility that had been the major achievement of urban society and communal life in medieval Tuscany (Luzzati 1981: 187, 206).

(Albrecht Dürer, THE FALL OF MAN (1510)

This powerful scene, on the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, evokes the expulsion of the peasantry from its common lands, which was starting to occur across western Europe at the very time when Dürer was producing this work.)

I demand whether all wars, bloodshed and misery came not upon the creation when one man endeavoured to be a lord over another?... And whether this misery shall not remove ... when all the branches of mankind shall look upon the earth as one common treasury to all.

– Gerrard Winstanley, The New Law of Righteousness, 1649

To him she was a fragmented commodity whose feelings and choices were rarely considered: her head and her heart were separated from her back and her hands and divided from her womb and vagina. Her back and muscle were pressed into field labor ... her hands were demanded to nurse and nurture the white man .... {H}er vagina, used for his sexual pleasure, was the gateway to the womb, which was his place of capital investment – the capital investment being the sex-act and the resulting child the accumulated surplus. …

– Barbara Omolade, “Heart of Darkness,” 1983

Part One: Introduction

The development of capitalism was not the only possible response to the crisis of feudal power. Throughout Europe, vast communalistic social movements and rebellions against feudalism had offered the promise of a new egalitarian society built on social equality and cooperation. However, by 1525 their most powerful expression, the “Peasant War” in Germany or, as Peter Blickle called it, the “revolution of the common man,” was crushed.1 A hundred thousand rebels were massacred in retaliation. Then, in 1535, “New Jerusalem,” the attempt made by the Anabaptists in the town of Münster to bring the kingdom of God to earth, also ended in a bloodbath, first undermined presumably by the patriarchal turn taken by its leaders who, by imposing polygamy, caused women among their ranks to revolt.2 With these defeats, compounded by the spreads of witch-hunts and the effects of colonial expansion, the revolutionary process in Europe came to an end. Military might was not sufficient, however, to avert the crisis of feudalism.

By the late Middle Ages the feudal economy was doomed, faced with an accumulation crisis that stretched for more than a century. We deduce its dimension from some basic estimates indicating that between 1350 and 1500 a major shift occurred in the power-relation between workers and masters. The real wage increased by 100%, prices declined by 33%, rents also declined, the length of the working-day decreased, and a tendency appeared toward local self-sufficiency.3 Evidence of a chronic disaccumulation trend in this period is also found in the pessimism of the contemporary merchants and landowners, and the measures which the European states adopted to protect markets, suppress competition and force people to work at the conditions imposed. As the entries in the registers of the feudal manors recorded, “the work {was} not worth the breakfast” (Dobb 1963: 54). The feudal economy could not reproduce itself, nor a capitalist society have “evolved” from it, for self-sufficiency and the new high-wage regime allowed for the “wealth of the people,” but “excluded the possibility of capitalistic wealth” (Marx 1909, Vol. I: 789).

It was in response to this crisis that the European ruling class launched the global offensive that in the course of at least three centuries was to change the history of the planet, laying the foundations of a capitalist world-system, in the relentless attempt to appropriate sources of wealth, expand its economic basis, and bring new workers under its command.

As we know, “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in brief force” were the pillars of this process (ibid.: 785). Thus, the concept of a “transition to capitalism” is in many ways a fiction. British historians, in the 1940s and 1950s, used it to define a period – roughly from 1450 to 1650 – in which feudalism in Europe was breaking down while no new social-economic system was yet in place, though elements of a capitalist society were taking shape.4 The concept of “transition,” then, helps us to think of a prolonged process of change and of societies in which capitalist accumulation coexisted with political formations not yet predominantly capitalistic. The term, however, suggests a gradual, linear historical development, whereas the period it names was among the bloodiest and most discontinuous in world history – one that saw apocalyptic transformations and which historians can only describe in the harshest terms: the Iron Age (Kamen), the Age of Plunder (Hoskins), and the Age of the Whip (Stone). “Transition,” then, cannot evoke the changes that paved the way to the advent of capitalism and the forces that shaped them. In this volume, therefore, I use the term primarily in a temporal sense, while I refer to the social processes that characterized the “feudal reaction” and the development of capitalist relations with the Marxian concept of “primitive accumulation,” though I agree with its critics that we must rethink Marx’s interpretation of it.5

Marx introduced the concept of “primitive accumulation” at the end of Capital Volume I to describe the social and economic restructuring that the European ruling class initiated in response to its accumulation crisis, and to establish (in polemics with Adam Smith)6 that: (i) capitalism could not have developed without a prior concentration of capital and labor; and that (ii) the divorcing of the workers from the means of production, not the abstinence of the rich, is the source of capitalist wealth. Primitive accumulation, then, is a useful concept, for it connects the “feudal reaction” with the development of the capitalist economy, and it identifies the historical and logical conditions for the development of capitalist system, “primitive” (“originary”) indicating a precondition for the existence of capitalist relations as much as a specific event in time.7

Marx, however, analyzed primitive accumulation almost exclusively from the viewpoint of the waged industrial proletariat: the protagonist, in his view, of the revolutionary process of his time and the foundation for the future communist society. Thus, in his account, primitive accumulation consists essentially in the expropriation of the land from the European peasantry and the formation of the “free,” independent worker, although he acknowledged that:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, {of America}, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins, are ... the chief moments of primitive accumulation... (Marx 1909, Vol. I: 823).

Marx also recognized that “{a} great deal of capital, which today appears in the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday in England the capitalized blood of children” (ibid.: 829-30). By contrast, we do not find in his work any mention of the profound transformations that capitalism introduced in the reproduction of labor-power and the social position of women. Nor does Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation mention the “Great Witch-Hunt” of the 16ᵗʰ and 17ᵗʰ centuries, although this state-sponsored terror campaign was central to the defeat of the European peasantry, facilitating its expulsion from the lands it once held in common.

In this chapter and those that follow, I discuss these developments, especially with reference to Europe, arguing that:

I. The expropriation of European workers from their means of subsistence, and the enslavement of Native Americans and Africans to the mines and plantations of the “New World,” were not the only means by which a world proletariat was formed and “accumulated.”

II. This process required the transformation of the body into a work-machine, and the subjugation of women to the reproduction of the work-force. Most of all, it required the destruction of the power of women which, in Europe as in America, was achieved through the extermination of the “witches.”

III. Primitive accumulation, then, was not simply an accumulation and concentration of exploitable workers and capital. It was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as “race” and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat.

IV. We cannot, therefore, identify capitalist accumulation with the liberation of the worker, female or male, as many Marxists (among others) have done, or see the advent of capitalism as a moment of historical progress. On the contrary, capitalism has created more brutal and insiclious forms of enslavement, as it has planted into the body of the proletariat deep divisions that have served to intensify and conceal exploitation. It is in great part because of these imposed divisions – especially those between women and men – that capitalist accumulation continues to devastate life in every corner of the planet.



Capitalist Accumulation and the Accumulation of Labor in Europe

Capital, Marx wrote, comes on the face of the earth dripping blood and dirt from head to toe (1909, Vol. I: 834) and, indeed, when we look at the beginning of capitalist development, we have the impression of being in an immense concentration camp. In the “New World” we have the subjugation of the aboriginal populations to the regimes of the mita and cuatelchil8 under which multitudes of people were consumed to bring silver and mercury to the surface in the mines of Huancavelica and Potosi. In Eastern Europe, we have a “second serfdom,” tying to the land a population of farmers who had never previously been enserfed.9 In Western Europe, we have the Enclosures, the Witch-Hunt, the branding, whipping, and incarceration of vagabonds and beggars in newly constructed work-houses and correction houses, models for the future prison system. On the horizon, we have the rise of the slave trade, while on the seas, ships are already transporting indentured servants and convicts from Europe to America.

What we deduce from this scenario is that force was the main lever, the main economic power in the process of primitive accumulation10 because capitalist development required an immense leap in the wealth appropriated by the European ruling class and the number of workers brought under its command. In other words, primitive accumulation consisted in an immense accumulation of labor-power – “dead labor” in the form of stolen goods, and “living labor” in the form of human beings made available for exploitation – realized on a scale never before matched in the course of history.

Significantly, the tendency of the capitalist class, during the first three centuries of its existence, was to impose slavery and other forms of coerced labor as the dominant work relation, a tendency limited only by the workers’ resistance and the danger of the exhaustion of the work-force.

This was true not only in the American colonies, where, by the 16ᵗʰ century, economies based on coerced labor were forming, but in Europe as well. Later, I examine the importance of slave-labor and the plantation system in capitalist accumulation. Here I want to stress that in Europe, too, in the 15ᵗʰ century, slavery, never completely abolished, was revitalized.11

As reported by the Italian historian Salvatore Bono, to whom we owe the most extensive study of slavery in Italy, there were numerous slaves in the Mediterranean areas in the 16ᵗʰ and 17ᵗʰ centuries, and their numbers grew after the Battle of Lepanto (1571) that escalated the hostilities against the Muslim world. Bono calculates that more than 10,000 slaves lived in Naples and 25,000 in the Napolitan kingdom as a whole (one per cent of the population) and similar figures apply to other Italian towns and to southern France. In Italy, a system of public slavery developed whereby thousands of kidnapped foreigners – the ancestors of today’s undocumented immigrant workers – were employed by city governments for public works, or were farmed out to private citizens who employed them in agriculture. Many were destined for the oars, an important source of such employment being the Vatican fleet (Bono 1999: 6-8).

Slavery is “that form {of exploitation} towards which the master always strives” (Dockes 1982: 2). Europe was no exception. This must be emphasized to dispel the assumption of a special connection between slavery and Africa.12 But in Europe slavery remained a limited phenomenon, as the material conditions for it did not exist, although the employers’ desires for it must have been quite strong if it took until the 18ᵗʰ century before slavery was outlawed in England. The attempt to bring back serfdom failed as well, except in the East, where population scarcity gave landlords the upper hand.13 In the West its restoration was prevented by peasant resistance culminating in the “German Peasant War.” A broad organizational effort spreading over three countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) and joining workers from every field (farmers, miners, artisans, including the best German and Austrian artists),14 this “revolution of the common man” was a watershed in European history. Like the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, it shook the powerful to the core, merging in their consciousness with the Anabaptists’ takeover of Münster, which confirmed their fears that an international conspiracy was underway to overthrow their power.15 After its defeat, which occurred in the same year as the conquest of Peru, and which was commemorated by Albrecht Dürer with the “Monument to the Vanquished Peasants” (Thea 1998: 65; 134-35), the revenge was merciless. “Thousands of corpses laid on the ground from Thuringia to Abace, in the fields, in the woods, in the ditches of a thousand dismantled, burned castles,” “murdered, tortured, impaled, martyred” (ibid.: 153, 146). But the clock could not be turned back. In various parts of Germany and the other territories that had been at the center of the “war.” Customary rights and even forms of territorial government were preserved.16

This was an exception. Where workers’ resistance to re-enserfment could not be broken, the response was the expropriation of the peasantry from its land and the introduction of forced wage-labor. Workers attempting to hire themselves out independently or leave their employers were punished with incarceration and even with death, in the case of recidivism. A “free” wage labor-market did not develop in Europe until the 18ᵗʰ century, and even then, contractual wage-work was obtained only at the price of an intense struggle and by a limited set of laborers, mostly male and adult. Nevertheless, the fact that slavery and serfdom could not be restored meant that the labor crisis that had characterized the late Middle Ages continued in Europe into the 17ᵗʰ century, aggravated by the fact that the drive to maximize the exploitation of labor put in jeopardy the reproduction of the work-force. This contradiction – which still characterizes capitalist development17 – exploded most dramatically in the American colonies, where work, disease, and disciplinary punishments destroyed two thirds of the native American population in the decades immediately after the Conquest.18 It was also at the core of the slave trade and the exploitation of slave labor. Millions of Africans died because of the torturous living conditions to which they were subjected during the Middle Passage and on the plantations. Never in Europe did the exploitation of the work-force reach such genocidal proportions, except under the Nazi regime. Even so, there too, in the 16ᵗʰ and 17ᵗʰ centuries, land privatization and the commodification of social relations (the response of lords and merchants to their economic crisis) caused widespread poverty, mortality, and an intense resistance that threatened to shipwreck the emerging capitalist economy. This, I argue, is the historical context in which the history of women and reproduction in the transition from feudalism to capitalism must be placed; for the changes which the advent of capitalism introduced in the social position of women – especially at the proletarian level, whether in Europe or America – were primarily dictated by the search for new sources of labor as well as new forms of regimentation and division of the work-force.

(Peasant unfurling the banner of “Freedom.”)

(Albrecht Dürer, MONUMENT TO THE VANQUISHED PEASANTS. (1526). This picture, representing a peasant enthroned on a collection of objects from his daily life, is highly ambiguous. It can suggest that the peasants were betrayed or that they themselves should be treated as traitors. Accordingly, it has been interpreted either as a satire of the rebel peasants or as a homage to their moral strength. What we know with certainty is that Dürer was profoundly perturbed by the events of 1525, and, as a convinced Lutheran, must have followed Luther in his condemnation of the revolt.)

In support of this statement, I trace the main developments that shaped the advent of capitalism in Europe – land privatization and the Price Revolution – to argue that neither was sufficient to produce a self-sustaining process of proletarianization. I then examine in broad oudines the policies which the capitalist class introduced to discipline, reproduce, and expand the European proletariat, beginning with the attack it launched on women, resulting in the construction of a new patriarchal order, which I define as the “patriarchy of the wage.” Lastly, I look at the production of racial and sexual hierarchies in the colonies, asking to what extent they could form a terrain of confrontation or solidarity between indigenous, African, and European women and between women and men.



Endnotes

1. Peter Blickle objects to the concept of a “peasant war” because of the social position of this revolution, which included many artisans, miners, and intellectuals among its ranks. The Peasant War combined ideological sophistication, expressed in the twelve “articles” which the rebels put forward, and a powerful military organization. The twelve “articles” included: the refusal of bondage, a reduction of the tithes, a repeal of the poaching laws, an affirmation of the rights to gather wood, a lessening of labor services, a reduction of rents, an affirmation of the rights to use the common, and an abolition of death taxes (Bickle 1985: 195-201). The exceptional military prowess demonstrated by the rebels depended in part on the participation of professional soldiers in the revolt, including the Landsknechte – the famous Swizz soldiers who, at the time, were the elite mercenary troops in Europe. The Landsknechte headed the peasant armies, putting their military expertise at their service and, in various occasions, refused to move against the rebels. In one case, they motivated their refusal by arguing that they too came from the peasantry and that they depended on the peasants for their sustenance in times of peace. When it was clear that they could not be trusted, the German princes mobilized the troops of the Swabian League, drawn from more remote regions, to break the peasant resistance. On the history of the Landsknechte and their participation in the Peasant War, see Reinhard Baumann, I Lanzichenecchi (1994: 237-256).

2. The Anabaptists, politically, represented a fusion of “the late medieval social movements and the new anti-clerical movement sparked off by the Reformation.” Like the medieval heretics, they condemned economic individualism and greed and supported a form of Christian communalism. Their take-over of Munster occurred in the wake of the Peasant War, when unrest and urban insurrections spread Frankfurt to Cologne and other towns of Northern Germany. In 1531, the crafts took control of the city of Munster, renamed it New Jerusalem, and under influence of immigrant Dutch Anabaptists, installed in it a communal government based upon the sharing of goods. As Po-Chia Hsia writes, the records of New Jerusalem were destroyed and its story has been told only by its enemies. Thus, we should not presume that events unfolded as narrated. According to the available records, women had at first enjoyed a high degree of freedom in the town; for instance, “they could divorce their unbelieving husbands and enter into new marriages.” Things changed with the decision by the reformed government to introduce polygamy in 1534, which provoked an “active resistance” among women, presumably repressed with imprisonment and even executions (Po-Chia 1988a: 58-59). Why this decision was taken is not clear. But the episode deserves more investigation, given the divisive role that the crafts played in the “transition” with regard to women. We know, in fact, that the craft campaigned in several tries to exclude women from the waged work-place, and nothing indicates they opposed the persecution of the witches.

3. For the rise of the real wage and the fall of prices in England, see North and Thomas (1973: 74). For Florentine wages, see Carlo M. Cipolla (1994: 206). For the fall in the value of output in England see R. H. Britnel (1993: 156-171). On the stagnation of agricultural production in a number of European countries, see B.H. Slicher Van Bath (1963: 160-170). Rodney Hilton argues that this period saw “a contraction of the rural and industrial economies ... probably felt in the first place by the ruling class .... Seigneurial revenues and industrial and commercial profits began to fall ... Revolt in the towns disorganized industrial production and revolt in the countryside strengthened peasant resistance to the payment of rent. Rent and profits thus dropped even further” (Hilton 1985: 240-241).

4. On Maurice Dobb and the debate on the transition to capitalism, see Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians. New York: St. Martin’s Press, (1984), 23-69.

5. Critics of Marx’s concept of “primitive accumulation” include: Samir Amin (1974) and Maria Mies (1986). While Samir Amin focusses on Marx’s Eurocentrism, Mies stresses Marx’s blindness to the exploitation of women. A different critique is found in Yann Moulier Boutang (1998) who faults Marx for generating the impression that the objective of the ruling class in Europe was to free itself from an unwanted work-force. Moulier Boutang underlines that the opposite was the case: land expropriation aimed to fix workers to their jobs, not to encourage mobility. Capitalism – as Moulier Boutang stresses –has always been primarily concerned with preventing the flight of labor (pp. 16-27).

6. As Michael Perelman points out, the term “primitive accumulation” was actually coined by Adam Smith and rejected by Marx, because of its ahistorical character in Smith’s usage. “To underscore his distance from Smith, Marx prefixed the pejorative ‘so-called’ to the title of the final part of the first volume of Capital, which he devoted to the study of primitive accumulation. Marx, in essence, dismissed Smith’s mythical ‘previous’ accumulation in order to call attention to the actual historical experience” (Perlman 1985: 25-26).

7. On the relation between the historical and the logical dimension of “primitive accumulation” and its implications for political movements today see: Massimo De Angelis, “Marx and Primitive Accumulation, The Continuous Character of Capital ‘Enclosures’.” In The Commoner: www.commoner.org.uk; Fredy Perlman, The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism. Detroit: Black and Red, 1985; and Mitchel Cohen, “Fredy Perlman: Out in Front of a Dozen Dead Oceans” (Unpublished manuscript, 1998).

8. For a description of the systems of the encomienda, mita, and catequil see (among others) Andr‎é Gunder Frank (1978), 45; Steve J. Stern (1982); and Inga Clendinnen (1987). As described by Gunder Frank, the encomienda was “a system under which rights to the labor of the Indian communities were granted to Spanish landowners.” But in 1548, the Spaniards “began to replace the encomienda de servicio by the repartimiento (called catequil in Mexico and mita in Peru), which required the Indian community’s chiefs to supply the Spanish juez repartidor (distributing judge) with a certain number of days of labor per month. ... The Spanish official in turn distributed this supply of labor to qualified enterprising labor contractors who were supposed to pay the laborers a certain minimum wage” (1978: 45). On the efforts of the Spaniards to bind labor in Mexico and Peru in the course of the various stages of colonization, and the impact on it of the catastrophic collapse of the indigenous population, see again Gunder Frank (ibid.: 43-49).

9. For a discussion of the “second serfdom” see Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) and Henry Kamen (1971). It is important here to stress that the newly enserfed peasants were now producing for the international grain market. In other words, despite the seeming backward character of the work-relation imposed upon them, under the new regime, they were an integral part of a developing capitalist economy and international capitalist division of labor.

10. I am echoing here Marx’s statement in Capital, Vol. I: “Force ... is in itself an economic power” (1909: 824). Far less convincing is Marx’s accompanying observation, according to which: “Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one” (ibid.). First, midwives bring life into the world, not destruction. This metaphor also suggests that capitalism “evolved” out of forces gestating in the bosom of the feudal world – an assumption which Marx himself refutes in his discussion of primitive accumulation. Comparing force to the generative power of a midwife also casts a benign veil over the process of capital accumulation, suggesting necessity, inevitability, and ultimately, progress.

11. Slavery had never been abolished in Europe, surviving in pockets, mostly as female domestic slavery. But by the end of the 15ᵗʰ century slaves began to be imported again, by the Portuguese, from Africa. Attempts to impose slavery continued in England through the 16ᵗʰ century, resulting (after the introduction of public relief) in the construction of work-houses and correction houses, which England pioneered in Europe.

12. See, on this point, Samir Amin (1974). To stress the existence of European slavery in the 16ᵗʰ and 17ᵗʰ centuries (and after) is also important because this fact has been often “forgotten” by European historians. According to Salvatore Bono, this self-induced oblivion was a product of the “Scramble for Africa,” which was justified as a mission aimed to terminate slavery on the African continent. Bono argues that Europe’s elites could not admit to having employed slaves in Europe, the alleged cradle of democracy.

13. Immanuel Wallerstein (1974), 90-95; Peter Kriedte (1978), 69-70.

14. Paolo Thea (1998) has powerfully reconstructed the history of the German artists who sided with the peasants.

“During the Protestant Reformation some among the best 16ᵗʰ-century German artists abandoned their laboratories to join the peasants in struggle. ...They drafted documents inspired by the principles of evangelic poverty, the common sharing of goods, and the redistribution of wealth. Sometimes ... they took arms in support of the cause.The endless list of those who, after the military defeats of May-June 1525, met the rigors of the penal code, mercilessly applied by the winners against the vanquished, includes famous names. Among them are {Jorg} Ratget quartered in Pforzheim (Stuttgart), {Philipp} Dietman beheaded, and {Tilman} Riemenschneider mutilated – both in Wurzburg – {Matthias} Grunewald chased from the court of Magonza where he worked. Holbein the Young was so troubled by the events that he fled from Basel, a city that was torn apart by religious conflict.” {My translation}

Also in Switzerland, Austria, and the Tyrol artists participated in the Peasant War, including famous ones like Lucas Cranach (Cranach the old) as well as myriad lesser painters and engravers (ibid.: 7). Thea points out that the deeply felt participation of the artists to the cause of the peasants is also demonstrated by the revaluation of rural themes depicting peasant life – dancing peasants, animals, and flora – in contemporary 16ᵗʰ-century German art (ibid.: 12-15; 73, 79, 80). “The countryside had become animated ... {it} had acquired in the uprising a personality worth of being represented” (ibid.: 155). {My translation}.

15. It was through the prism of the Peasant War and Anabaptism that the European governments, through the 16ᵗʰ and 17ᵗʰ centuries, interpreted and repressed every form of social protest. The echoes of the Anabaptist revolution were felt in Elizabethan England and in France, inspiring utmost vigilance and severity with regard to any challenge to the constituted authority. “Anabaptist” became a cursed word, a sign of opprobrium and criminal intent, as “communist” was in the United States in the 1950s, and “terrorist” is today.

(Early 17ᵗʰ-century German engraving reviling the Anabaptists’ belief in the communistic sharing of goods.)

16. Village authority and privileges were maintained in the hinterland of some city-states. In a number of territorial states, the peasants “continued to refuse dues, taxes, and labor services”; “they let me yell and give me nothing,” complained the abbot of Schussenried, referring to those working on his land (Blickle 1985: 172). In Upper Swabia, though serfdom was not abolished, some of the main peasant grievances relating to inheritance and marriage rights were accepted with the Treaty of Menuningen of 1526. “On the Upper Rhine, too, some areas reached settlements that were positive for the peasants” (ibid.: 172-174). In Switzerland, in Bern and Zurich, serfdom was abolished. Improvements in the lot of the “common man” were negotiated in Tyrol and Salzburg (ibid.: 176-179). But “the true child of the revolution” was the territorial assembly, instituted after 1525 in Upper Swabia, providing the foundation for a system of self-government that remained in place till the 19ᵗʰ century. New territorial assemblies emerged after 1525 “{realizing} in a weakened form one of the demands of 1525: that the common man ought to be part of the territorial estates alongside the nobles, the clergy, and the towns.” Blickle concludes that “Wherever this cause won out, we cannot say that there the lords crowned their military conquest with political victory, {as} the prince was still bound to the consent of the common man. Only later, during the formation of the absolute state, did the prince succeed in freeing himself from that consent” (ibid.: 181-182).

17. Referring to the growing pauperization brought about across the world by capitalist development, the French anthropologist Claude Meillassoux, in Maidens, Meal and Money (1981), has argued that this contradiction spells a future crisis for capitalism: “In the end imperialism – as a means of reproducing cheap labor power – is leading capitalism to a major crisis, for even if there are still millions of people in the world ... not directly involved in capitalist employment ... how many are still capable owing to the social disruption, famine and wars it brings about, of producing their own subsistence and feeding their children?” (1981: 140).

18. The extent of the demographic catastrophe caused by “the Columbian Exchange” is still debated. Estimates of the population decline in South and Central America, in the first post-Columbian century, range widely, but contemporary scholarly opinion is almost unanimous in likening its effects to an American Holocaust. André Gunder Frank writes that: “Within little more than a century, the Indian population declined by ninety percent and even ninety-five percent in Mexico, Peru, and some other regions” (1978: 43). Similarly, Noble David Cook argues that: “Perhaps 9 million people resided within the limits delineated by Peru’s contemporary boundaries. The number of inhabitants remaining a century after contact was roughly a tenth of those that were there when the Europeans invaded the Andean world” (Cook 1981: 116).

YEARS | KILOGRAMS OF GRAIN

1351-1400 | 121.8

1401-1450 | 155.1

1451 -1500 | 143.5

1501-1550 | 122.4

1551-1600 | 83.0

1601-1650 | 48.3

1651-1700 | 74.1

1701-1750 | 94.6

1751-1800 | 79.6

It took centuries for wages in Europe to return to the level they had reached in the late Middle Ages. Things deteriorated to the point that, in England, by 1550, male artisans had to work forty weeks to earn the same income that, at the beginning of the century, they had been able to obtain in fifteen weeks. In France, {see graph, next page} wages dropped by sixty percent between 1470 and 1570 (Hackett Fischer 1996: 78).43 The wage collapse was especially disastrous for women. In the 14ᵗʰ century, they had received half the pay of a man for the same task; but by the mid-16ᵗʰ century they were receiving only one-third of the reduced male wage, and could no longer support themselves by wage-work, neither in agriculture nor in manufacturing, a fact undoubtedly responsible for the massive spread of prostitution in this period.44 What followed was the absolute impoverishment of the European working class, a phenomenon so widespread and general that, by 1550 and long after, workers in Europe were referred to as simply “the poor.”

Evidence for this dramatic impoverishment is the change that occurred in the workers’ diets. Meat disappeared from their tables, except for a few scraps of lard, and so did beer and wine, salt and olive oil (Braudel 1973: 127ff; Le Roy Ladurie 1974). From the 16ᵗʰ to the 18ᵗʰ centuries, the workers’ diets consisted essentially of bread, the main expense in their budget. This was a historic setback (whatever we may think of dietary norms) compared to the abundance of meat that had typified the late Middle Ages. Peter Kriedte writes that at that time, the “annual meat consumption had reached the figure of 100 kilos per person, an incredible quantity even by today’s standards. Up to the 19ᵗʰ century this figure declined to less than twenty kilos” (Kriedte 1983: 52). Braudel too speaks of the end of “carnivorous Europe,” summoning as a witness the Swabian Heinrich Muller who, in 1550, commented that,

...in the past they ate differently at the peasant’s house. Then, there was meat and food in profusion every day; tables at village fairs and feasts sank under their load. Today, everything has truly changed. For some years, in fact, what a calamitous time, what high prices! And the food of the most comfortably off peasants is almost worse than that of day-labourers and valets previously” (Braudel 1973: 130).

Not only did meat disappear, but food shortages became common, aggravated in times of harvest failure, when the scanty grain reserves sent the price of grain sky-high, condemning city dwellers to starvation (Braudel 1966, Vol. I: 328). This is what occurred in the famine years of the 1540s and 1550s, and again in the decades of the 1580s and 1590s, which were some of the worst in the history of the European proletariat, coinciding with widespread unrest and a record number of witch-trials. But malnutrition was rampant also in normal times, so that food acquired a high symbolic value as a marker of rank. The desire for it among the poor reached epic proportions, inspiring dreams of Pantagruelian orgies, like those described by Rabelais in his Gargantua and Pantagruel (1552), and causing nightmarish obsessions, such as the conviction (spread among eastern Italian farmers) that witches roamed the countryside at night to feed upon cattle (Mazzali 1988: 73).

(Price Revolution and the Fall of the Real Wage, 1480-1640. The Price Revolution triggered a historic collapse in the real wage. Within a few decades, the real wage lost two-thirds of its purchasing power. The real wage did not return to the level it had reached in the 15ᵗʰ century until the 19ᵗʰ century (Phelps-Brown and Hopkins, 1981).)

(The social consequences of the Price Revolution are revealed by these charts, which indicate, respectively, the rise in the price of grain in England between 1490 and 1650, the concomitant rise in prices and property crimes in Essex (England) between 1566 and 1602, and the population decline measured in millions in Germany, Austria, Italy and Spain between 1500 and 1750 (Hackett Fischer, 1996).)

Indeed, the Europe that was preparing to become a Promethean world-mover, presumably taking humankind to new technological and cultural heights, was a place where people never had enough to eat. Food became an object of such intense desire that it was believed that the poor sold their souls to the devil to get their hands on it. Europe was also a place where, in times of bad harvests, country-folk fed upon wild roots, or the barks of trees, and multitudes roved the countryside weeping and wailing, “so hungry that they would devour the beans in the fields” (Le Roy Ladurie 1974); or they invaded the cities to benefit from grain distributions or to attack the houses and granaries of the rich who, in turn, rushed to get arms and shut the city gates to keep the starving out (Heller 1986: 56-63).

That the transition to capitalism inaugurated a long period of starvation for workers in Europe – which plausibly ended because of the economic expansion produced by colonization – is also demonstrated by the fact that, while in the 14ᵗʰ and 15ᵗʰ centuries, the proletarian struggle had centered around the demand for “liberty” and less work, by the 16ᵗʰ and 17ᵗʰ, it was mostly spurred by hunger, taking the form of assaults on bakeries and granaries, and of riots against the export of local crops.45 The authorities described those who participated in these attacks as “good for nothing” or “poor” and “humble people,” but most were craftsmen, living, by this time, from hand to mouth.

It was the women who usually initiated and led the food revolts. Six of the thirty-one food riots in 17ᵗʰ-century France studied by Ives-Marie Bercé were made up solely of women. In the others the female presence was so conspicuous that Bercé calls them “women's riots.”46 Commenting on this phenomenon, with reference to 18ᵗʰ-century England, Sheila Rowbotham concluded that women were prominent in this type of protest because of their role as their families’ caretakers. But women were also most ruined by high prices for, having less access to money and employment than men, they were more dependent on cheap food for survival. This is why, despite their subordinate status, they took quickly to the streets when food prices went up, or when rumor spread that the grain supplies were being removed from town. This is what happened at the time of the Cordoba uprising of 1652, which started “early in the morning ... when a poor woman went weeping through the streets of the poor quarter, holding the body of her son who had died of hunger” (Kamen 1971: 364). The same occurred in Montpellier in 1645, when women took to the streets “to protect their children from starvation” (ibid.: 356). In France, women besieged the bakeries when they became convinced that grain was to be embezzled, or found out that the rich had bought the best bread and the remaining was lighter or more expensive. Crowds of poor women would then gather at the bakers’ stalls, demanding bread and charging the bakers with hiding their supplies. Riots broke out also in the squares where grain markets were held, or along the routes taken by the carts with the corn to be exported, and “at the river banks where ... boatmen could be seen loading the sacks.” On these occasions the rioters ambushed the carts ... with pitchforks and sticks ... the men carrying away the sacks, the women gathering as much grain as they could in their skirts” (Bercé: 1990: 171-73).

The struggle for food was fought also by other means, such as poaching, stealing from one’s neighbors’ fields or homes, and assaults on the houses of the rich. In Troyes in 1523 rumor had it that the poor had put the houses of the rich on fire, preparing to invade them (Heller 1986: 55-56). At Malines, in the Low Countries, the houses of speculators were marked by angry peasants with blood (Hackett Fischer 1996: 88). Not surprisingly, “food crimes” loom large in the disciplinary procedures of the 16ᵗʰ and 17ᵗʰ centuries. Exemplary is the recurrence of the theme of the “diabolical banquet” in the witch-trials, suggesting that feasting on roasted mutton, white bread, and wine was now considered a diabolic act in the case of the “common people.” But the main weapons available to the poor in their struggle for survival were their own famished bodies, as in times of famine hordes of vagabonds and beggars surrounded the better off, half-dead of hunger and disease, grabbing their arms, exposing their wounds to them and, forcing them to live in a state of constant fear at the prospect of both contamination and revolt. “You cannot walk down a street or stop in a square” – a Venetian man wrote in the mid-16ᵗʰ century – “without multitudes surrounding you to beg for charity: you see hunger written on their faces, their eyes like gemless rings, the wretchedness of their bodies with skins shaped only by bones” (ibid.: 88). A century later, in Florence, the scene was the same. “{It} was impossible to hear Mass,” one G. Balducci complained, in April 1650, “so much was one importuned during the service by wretched people naked and covered with sores” (Braudel 1966, Vol. II: 734-35).47

(Family of vagabonds. Engraving by Lucas van Leyden, 1520.)



The State Intervention in the Reproduction of Labor: Poor Relief, and the Criminalization of the Working Class

The struggle for food was not the only front in the battle against the spread of capitalist relations. Everywhere masses of people resisted the destruction of their former ways of existence, fighting against land privatization, the abolition of customary rights, the imposition of new taxes, wage-dependence, and the continuous presence of armies in their neighborhoods, which was so hated that people rushed to close the gates of their towns to prevent soldiers from settling among them.

In France, one thousand “emotions” (uprisings) occurred between the 1530s and 1670s, many involving entire provinces and requiring the intervention of troops (Goubert 1986: 205). England, Italy, and Spain present a similar picture,48 indicating that the pre-capitalist world of the village, which Marx dismissed under the rubric of “rural idiocy,” could produce as high a level of struggle as any the industrial proletariat has waged.

In the Middle Ages, migration, vagabondage, and the rise of “crimes against property” were part of the resistance to impoverishment and dispossession; these phenomena now took on massive proportions. Everywhere – if we give credit to the complaints of the contemporary authorities – vagabonds were swarming, changing cities, crossing borders, sleeping in the haystacks or crowding at the gates of towns – a vast humanity involved in a diaspora of its own, that for decades escaped the authorities’ control. Six thousand vagabonds were reported in Venice alone in 1545. “In Spain vagrants cluttered the road, stopping at every town” (Braudel, Vol. II: 740).49 Starting with England, always a pioneer in these matters, the state passed new, far harsher anti-vagabond laws prescribing enslavement and capital punishment in cases of recidivism. But repression was not effective and the roads of 16ᵗʰ and 17ᵗʰ-century Europe remained places of great (com)motion and encounters. Through them passed heretics escaping persecution, discharged soldiers, journeymen and other “humble folk” in search of employment, and then foreign artisans, evicted peasants, prostitutes, hucksters, petty thieves, professional beggars. Above all, through the roads of Europe passed the tales, stories, and experiences of a developing proletariat. Meanwhile, the crime rates also escalated, in such proportions that we can assume that a massive reclamation and reappropriation of the stolen communal wealth was underway.50

Today, these aspects of the transition to capitalism may seem (for Europe at least) things of the past or – as Marx put it in the Grundrisse (1973: 459) – “historical preconditions” of capitalist development, to be overcome by more mature forms of capitalism. But the essential similarity between these phenomena and the social consequences of the new phase of globalization that we are witnessing tells us otherwise. Pauperization, rebellion, and the escalation of “crime” are structural elements of capitalist accumulation as capitalism must strip the work-force from its means of reproduction to impose its own rule.

(Vagrant being whipped through the streets.)

That in the industrializing regions of Europe, by the 19ᵗʰ century, the most extreme forms of proletarian misery and rebellion had disappeared is not a proof against this claim. Proletarian misery and rebellions did not come to an end; they only lessened to the degree that the super-exploitation of workers had been exported, through the institutionalization of slavery, at first, and later through the continuing expansion of colonial domination.

As for the “transition” period, this remained in Europe a time of intense social conflict, providing the stage for a set of state initiatives that, judging from their effects, had three main objectives: (a) to create a more disciplined work-force; (b) to diffuse social protest; and (c) to fix workers to the jobs forced upon them. Let us look at them in turn.

In pursuit of social discipline, an attack was launched against all forms of collective sociality and sexuality including sports, games, dances, ale-wakes, festivals, and other group-rituals that had been a source of bonding and solidarity among workers. It was sanctioned by a deluge of bills: twenty-five, in England, just for the regulation of ale-houses, in the years between 1601 and 1606 (Underdown 1985: 47-48). Peter Burke (1978), in his work on the subject, has spoken of it as a campaign against “popular culture.” But we can see that what was at stake was the desocialization or decollectivization of the reproduction of the work-force, as well as the attempt to impose a more productive use of leisure time. This process, in England, reached its climax with the coming to power of the Puritans in the aftermath of the Civil War (1642-49), when the fear of social indiscipline prompted the banning of all proletarian gatherings and merrymaking. But the “moral reformation” was equally intense in non-Protestant areas where, in the same period, religious processions were replacing the dancing and singing that had been held in and out of the churches. Even the individual’s relation with God was privatized: in Protestant areas, with the institution of a direct relationship between the individual and the divinity; in the Catholic areas, with the introduction of individual confession. The church itself, as a community center, ceased to host any social activity other than those addressed to the cult. As a result, the physical enclosure operated by land privatization and the hedging of the commons was amplified by a process of social enclosure, the reproduction of workers shifting from the openfield to the home, from the community to the family, from the public space (the common, the church) to the private.51

Secondly, in the decades between 1530 and 1560, a system of public assistance was introduced in at least sixty European towns, both by initiative of the local municipalities and by direct intervention of the central state.52 Its precise goals are still debated. While much of the literature on the topic sees the introduction of public assistance as a response to a humanitarian crisis that jeopardized social control, in his massive study of coerced labor, the French Marxist scholar Yann Moulier Boutang insists that its primary objective was “The Great Fixation” of the proletariat, that is, the attempt to prevent the flight of labor.53

In any event, the introduction of public assistance was a turning point in the state relation between workers and capital and the definition of the function of the state. It was the first recognition of the unsustainability of a capitalist system ruling exclusively by means of hunger and terror. It was also the first step in the reconstruction of the state as the guarantor of the class relation and as the chief supervisor of the reproduction and disciplining of the work-force.

Antecedents for this function can be found in the 14ᵗʰ century, when faced with the generalization of the anti-feudal struggle, the state had emerged as the only agency capable of confronting a working class that was regionally unified, armed, and no longer confined in its demands to the political economy of the manor. In 1351, with the passing of the Statute of Laborers in England, which fixed the maximum wage, the state had formally taken charge of the regulation and repression of labor, which the local lords were no longer capable of guaranteeing. But it was with the introduction of public assistance that the State began to claim “ownership” of the work-force, and a capitalist “division of labor” was instituted within the ruling class, enabling employers to relinquish any responsibility for the reproduction of workers, in the certainty that the state would intervene, either with the carrot or with the stick, to address the inevitable crises. With this innovation, a leap occurred also in the management of social reproduction, resulting in the introduction of demographic recording (census-taking, recording of mortality, natality, marriage rates) and the application of accounting to social relations. Exemplary is the work of the administrators of the Bureau de Pauvres in Lyon (France), who by the end of the 16ᵗʰ century had learned to calculate the number of the poor, assess the amount of food needed by each child or adult, and keep track of the deceased, to make sure that nobody could claim assistance in the name of a dead person (Zemon Davis 1968: 244-46).

Along with this new “social science,” an international debate also developed on the administration of public assistance anticipating the contemporary debate on welfare. Should only those unable to work, described as the “deserving poor,” be supported, or should “able-bodied” laborers unable to find a job also be given help? And how much or how little should they be given, so as not to be discouraged from looking for work? These questions were crucial from the viewpoint of social discipline, as a key objective of public aid was to tie workers to their jobs. But, on these matters a consensus could rarely be reached.

While humanist reformers like Juan Luis Vives54 and spokesmen for the wealthy burghers recognized the economic and disciplinary benefits of a more liberal and centralized dispensation of charity (not exceeding the distribution of bread, however), part of the clergy strenuously opposed the ban on individual donations. But, across differences of systems and opinions, assistance was administered with such stinginess that it generated as much conflict as appeasement. Those assisted resumed the humiliating rituals imposed on them, like wearing the “mark of infamy” (previously reserved for lepers and Jews), or (in France) participating in the annual processions of the poor, in which they had to parade singing hymns and holding candles; and they vehemently protested when the alms were not promptly given or were inadequate to their needs. In response, in some French towns, gibbets were erected at the time of food distributions or when the poor were asked to work in exchange for the food they received (Zemon Davis, 1968: 249). In England, as the 16ᵗʰ century progressed, receipt of public aid – also for children and the elderly – was made conditional on the incarceration of the recipients in “work-houses,” where they became the experimental subjects for a variety of work-schemes.55 Consequently, the attack on workers, that had begun with the enclosures and the Price Revolution, in the space of a century, led to the criminalization of the working class, that is, the formation of a vast proletariat either incarcerated in the newly constructed work-houses and correction-houses, or seeking its survival outside the law and living in open antagonism to the state – always one step away from the whip and the noose.

From the viewpoint of the formation of a laborious work-force, this was a decisive failure, and the constant preoccupation with the question of social discipline in 16ᵗʰ and 17ᵗʰ-century political circles indicates that the contemporary statesmen and entrepreneurs were keenly aware of it. Moreover, the social crisis that this general state of rebelliousness provoked was aggravated in the second half of the 16ᵗʰ century by a new economic contraction, in great part caused by the dramatic population decline that occurred in Spanish America after the Conquest, and the shrinking of the colonial economies.



Endnotes

40. Braudel (1966), Vol. 1, 517-524.

41. As Peter Kriedte (1983) sums up the economic developments of this period: “The crisis sharpened the differentials in income and property. Pauperization and proletarianization were paralleled by an increased accumulation of wealth. ...Work on Chippenham in Cambridgeshire has shown that the bad harvests of {the late 16ᵗʰ and early 17ᵗʰ centuries} resulted in a decisive shift. Between 1544 and 1712 the medium-sized farms all but disappeared. At the same time the proportion of properties of 90 acres or more rose from 3% to 14%; households without land increased from 32% to 63%” (Kriedte 1983: 54-55).

42. Wallerstein (1974), 83; Le Roy Ladurie (1928-1929). The growing interest of capitalist entrepreneurs for money-lending was perhaps the motivation behind the expulsion of the Jews from most cities and countries of Europe in the 15ᵗʰ and 16ᵗʰ centuries – Parma (1488), Milan (1489), Geneva (1490), Spain (1492), and Austria (1496). Expulsions and pogroms continued for a century. Until the tide was turned by Rudolph II in 1577, it was illegal for Jews to live in most of Western Europe. As soon as money-lending became a lucrative business, this activity, previously declared unworthy of a Christian, was rehabilitated, as shown by this dialogue between a peasant and a wealthy burgher, written anonymously in Germany around 1521:

Peasant: What brings me to you? Why, l would like to see how you spend your time.

Burgher: How should I spend my time? I sit here counting my money, can't you see?

Peasant: Tell me, burgher, who gave you so much money that you spend all your time counting it?

Burgher: You want to know who gave me my money? I shall tell you. A peasant comes knocking at my door and asks me to lend him ten or twenty gulden. I inquire of him whether he owns a pIot of good pasture land or a nice field for plowing. He says: ‘Yes, burgher, I have a good meadow and a fine field, worth a hundred gulden the two of them.’ I reply: ‘Excellent! Pledge your meadow and your field as collateral, and if you will undertake to pay one gulden a year as interest, you can have your loan of twenty gulden: Happy to hear the good news, the peasant replies: ‘I gladly give you my pledge.’ ‘But I must tell you,’ I rejoin, ‘that if ever you fail to pay your interest on time, I will take possession of your land and make it my property.’ And this does not worry the peasant, he proceeds to assign his pasture and field to me as his pledge. I lend him the money and he pays interest punctually for one year or two; then comes a bad harvest and soon he is behind in his payment. I confiscate his land, evict him and meadow and field are mine. And I do this not only with peasants but with artisans as well. If a tradesman owns a good house I lend him a sum of money on it, and before long the house belongs to me. In this way I acquire much property and wealth, which is why I spend all my time counting my money.

Peasant: And I thought only the Jews practiced usury! Now I hear that Christians do it, too.

Burgher: Usury? Who is talking about usury? Nobody here practices usury. What the debtor pays is interest (G. Strauss: 110-111).

43. With reference to Germany, Peter Kriedte writes that: “Recent research has shown that a building worker in Augsburg {in Bavaria} was able adequately to maintain his wife and two children from his annual income during the first three decades of the 16ᵗʰ century. Thenceforth his living standard began to fall. Between 1566 and 1575 and from 1585 to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War his wages could no longer pay for the subsistence minimun of his family” (Kriedte 1983: 51-52). On the impoverishment of the Europen working class due to the enclosures and the Price Revolution see also C. Lis & H. Soly (1979), 72-79. As they write, in England “between 1500 and 1600 grain prices rose sixfold, while wages rose threefold. Not surprisingly, workers and cottars were but ‘house beggars’ for Francis Bacon.” In the same period, in France, the purchasing power of cottars and waged workers fell by forty five percent. “In New Castile... wage labour and poverty were considered synonymous.” (ibid.: 72-4).

44. On the growth of prostitution in the 16ᵗʰ century see, Nickie Roberts, Whores in History: Prostitution in Western Society (1992).

45. Manning (1988); Fletcher (1973); Cornwall (1977); Beer (1982); Bercé (1990); Lombardini (1983).

46. Kamen (1971), Bercé (1990), 169-179; Underdown (1985). As David Underdown notes:

“The prominent role played by female {food} rioters has often been noted. At Southampton in 1608 a group of women refused to wait while the corporation debated what to do about a ship being loaded with grain for London; they boarded it and seized the cargo. Women were thought to be the likely rioters in the incident in Weymouth in 1622, while at Dorchester in 1631 a group (some of them inmates of the workhouse) stopped a cart in the mistaken belief that it contained wheat; one of them complained of a local merchant who “did send away the best fruits of the land, as butter, cheese, wheat, etc., over the seas” (1985: 117). On women’s presence in food riots, see also Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford (1998), who write that “women played a prominent role in grain riots {in England}.” For instance, “{a}t Maldon in 1629 a crowd of over a hundred women and children boarded the ships to prevent grain from being shipped away.” They were ted by a “Captain Ann Carter, later tried and hanged” for her leading role in the protest (ibid.: 385-86).

47. In a similar vein were the comments of a physician in the Italian city of Bergamo, during the famine of 1630:

“The loathing and terror engendered by a maddened crowd of half dead people who importune all comers in the streets, in piazzas, in the churches, at street doors, so that life is intolerable, and in addition the foul stench rising from them as well as the constant spectacle of the dying ... this cannot be believed by anyone who has not experienced it” (quoted by Carlo M. Cipolla 1993: 129).

48. On 16ᵗʰ and 17ᵗʰ-century protest in Europe, see Henry Kamen, The Iron Century (1972), in particular Chapter 10, “Popular Rebellion. 1550-1660” (pp. 331-385). As Kamen writes, “The crisis of 1595-7 was operative throughout Europe, with repercussions in England, France, Austria, Finland, Hungary, Lithuania, and Ukraine. Probably never before in European history had so many popular rebellions coincided in time” (p. 336). There were rebellions in Naples in 1595, 1620, 1647 (ibid.: 334-35, 350, 361-63). In Spain, rebellions erupted in 1640 in Catalonia, in Grenada in 1648, in Cordova and Seville in 1652. For riots and rebellions in 16ᵗʰ and 17ᵗʰ-century England, see Cornwall (1977); Underdown (1985), and Manning (1988). On revolt in Spain and Italy, see also Braudel (1976, Vol. II), 738-739.

49. On vagrancy in Europe, beside Beier and Geremek, see Braudel (1976), Vol. II, 739-743; Kamen (1972), 390-394.

50. On the rise of property crimes in the wake of the Price Revolution see the Charter on p. 141 in this volume. See Richard J. Evans (1996), 35; Kamen (1972), 397-403; and Lis and Soly (1984). Lis and Soly write that “{t}he available evidence suggests that the overall crime rate did indeed rise markedly in Elizabethan and early Stuart England, especially between 1590 and 1620” (p. 218).

51. In England, among the moments of sociality and collective reproduction that were terminated due to the loss of the open fields and the commons there were the processions that were held in the spring to bless the fields – which could no longer take place once the fields were fenced off – and the dances that were held around the Maypole on May First (Underdown 1985).

52. Lis and Soly (1979), 92. On the institution of Public Assistance, see Geremek’s Poverty: A History (1994), Chapter 4: “The Reform of Charity” (pp. 142-177).

53. Yann Moulier Boutang, De L'esclavage au salariat (1998), 291-293. I only partially agree with Moulier Boutang when he claims that Poor Relief was not so much a response to the misery produced by land expropriation and price inflation, but a measure intended to prevent the flight of workers and thereby create a local labor market (1998). As already mentioned, MouIier Boutang overemphasizes the degree of mobility available to the dispossessed proletariat as he does not consider the different situation of women. Furthermore, he underplays the degree to which assistance was the result of a struggle – a struggle that cannot be reduced to the flight of labor, but included assaults, the invasion of towns by masses of starving rural people (a constant feature, in mid-16ᵗʰ-century France) and other forms of attack. It is not coincidence, in this context, that Norwich, the center of the Kett Rebellion became, shortly after its defeat, the center and the model of Poor Relief reform.

54. The Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives, who was knowledgeable about the poor relief systems of the Flanders and Spain, was one of the main supporters of public charity. In his De Subvention Pauperum (1526) he argued that “secular authority rather than the Church should be responsible for the aid to the poor” (Geremek 1994: 187). He also stressed that authorities should find work for the able-bodied, insisting that “the dissolute, the crooked, the thieving and the idle should be given the hardest work, and the most badly paid, in order that their example might serve as a deterrent to others” (ibid.).

55. The main work on the rise of work-house and correction houses is Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini, The Prison and the Factory: Origins of the Penitentiary System (1981). The authors point out that the main purpose of incarceration was to break the sense of identity and solidarity of the poor. See also Geremek (1994), 206-229. On the schemes concocted by English proprietors to incarcerate the poor in their parishes, see Marx, Capital Vol. I (1909: 793). For France, see Foucault, Madness and Civilization (1965), especially Chapter 2: “The Great Confinement” (pp. 38-64).