International Critical Thought

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Karl Marx and the Transition from Feudalism to

Capitalism

Carlos Astarita

To cite this article: Carlos Astarita (2018): Karl Marx and the Transition from Feudalism to
Capitalism, International Critical Thought, DOI: 10.1080/21598282.2018.1478248

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2018.1478248

Published online: 14 Jun 2018.

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INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT
https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2018.1478248

Karl Marx and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism

Carlos Astarita
Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The purpose of this article is to revise Karl Marx’s model for the Received 1 October 2017
formation of capitalism in light of new research. In Das Kapital, Revised 27 January 2018
Marx focused his study in England through parliamentary Accepted 30 January 2018
documents. The present article examines not only the English
KEYWORDS
situation, but also that of other areas, especially Castile, through Marx; transition to capitalism;
village documents. It demonstrates that the new relations of current research
production developed within the functioning process of
feudalism. Therefore, there was only one contradictory logic for
the reproduction of feudalism and the genesis of capitalism. This
leads to the reconsideration of the role of class struggle in the
transition.

Introduction
It is known that Marx’s goal was the analysis of the capitalist mode of production. It is also
known that this study led him to address central questions about its genesis in the chapter
of Das Kapital titled “Die sogenannte ursprüngliche Akkumulation” (so-called primitive
accumulation) with a focus on England and the laws passed in that country from 1351
onward (Marx 1976, vol. 1, 741ff.). It was through this line of inquiry that the Later Middle
Ages came to feature in his studies.
Marx’s approach to the birth of capitalism was based, first and foremost, on his own
concept of capitalism whose peculiarity is of substantial importance because, unlike Pir-
enne (1910, 1937), who viewed capitalism as a situation of the market, and unlike
Weber (1986), who conceived it as a form of the spirit guided by the systematic search
for profit by means of rational economic activity, for Marx capitalism was a mode of pro-
duction. This means that capitalism is characterized by the capitalist’s property of the
means of production, which in turn presupposes the non-property of the proletariat.
Regardless of specific issues, there is a fundamental difference between these authors:
while for Pirenne and Weber it is possible to find profitable activities and markets (that
is to say, capitalism) in the Europe of the eighth or twelfth centuries (as well as among
ancient Phoenicians), for Marx this mode of production only began in the sixteenth cen-
tury. Thus, total de-historization stands in opposition to an eminently historical problem.
This latter problem is what we are now going to explore in order to review it in light of
current research. Our analysis will focus on Castile and the comparison of Castile with
England, the country where Marx focused his study (although it was not the only place

CONTACT Carlos Astarita carlos.astarita@gmail.com

© 2018 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
2 C. ASTARITA

for which he analyzed economic development or non-development: we know, for example,

that India and Russia also drew his attention). We will occasionally resort to comparisons
with other regions. Due to the general and theoretical nature of the questions addressed
here, documentary and bibliographical references will be limited to the minimum.

Marx and the So-Called Accumulation of Capital

Marx’s historical and conceptual starting point can be found in the Manuscripts written
immediately prior to the first volume of Das Kapital (Marx 1983). Here he stated that
man emerged as a social being by appropriating the surrounding natural conditions,
and therefore communal ownership was man’s primary state. Consequently, for Marx
the origin of property did not pose any mystery. However, what for Marx did pose a pro-
blem requiring an explanation was the origin of non-property. In other words, he had to
elucidate how the English peasantry of the latter part of the Middle Ages gradually lost
possession of their land and their means of production to become proletarian. Marx
had to explain the formation of this doubly free producer, one who was liberated from
the means of production and also free to sell his labor force in the market. This question
is central and remains valid in that it holds sway over the question of the origins of capit-
alism both from a theoretical and a historical point of view; indeed, the chapter on
accumulation has more empirically historical content than any other in Das Kapital.
Along with this question, we must also revise the solution Marx proposed for the pro-
cess, since his explanation entails a series of limitations. Let’s enumerate:
(1) Marx’s explanation, as written in the above-mentioned chapter of Das Kapital,
revolves around the enclosures that led to the privatization of communal lands, giving
rise to a mass of the dispossessed who would have made up the first proletariat. The objec-
tion to this scheme is that vagabonds were an undisciplined and itinerant mass that did not
constitute a constant labor force.1
(2) Secondly, according to Marx this process took place in England in the context of the
decline of feudalism starting in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Marx 1976, vol. 1,
744). However, feudalism did not disappear in England during those centuries (Hill 1955);
neither did it disappear from other European countries. Moreover, rural domestic industry
—which was the first form of the capitalist mode of production—arose in the Later Middle
Ages in different regions of Europe (not only in England), and this first capitalism even
occurred in regions where the feudal system continued to predominate widely during
the modern era, which is a matter we shall revisit.
(3) It must be added that Marx himself outlined (but did not develop) another con-
ception of the origin of capitalism: when delving into the matter of simple cooperation
in Das Kapital, he argued that capital appropriated production in the technical conditions
provided by the Middle Ages (Marx 1976, vol. 1, 766). Indeed, this idea, which concurs
with his argument that the first subordination of labor by capital was purely formal and
partly accidental, can be applied to the purchase system (Kaufsystem) that gave rise to
the putting-out system, also called Verlagssystem, proto-industry, or rural domestic indus-
try (we will return to this question). It should be noted that Marx correctly rejected the
notion that the new mode of production originated in the large cloth-making cities of
Italy because those were only precursors of capitalism (Marx 1976, vol. 1, 743). Subsequent
research has validated this conclusion: although capitalist relations in cities occurred when
 INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 3

an indebted craftsman lost his means of production to a large merchant, guild laws forbade
the reinvestment of profits into production, thus precluding the organization of capital-
ism.2 This means that, as Marx said (Marx 1976, vol. 3, 347), when a merchant seized pro-
duction (which is what happened in the great cloth-making cities of the Middle Ages), it
was an impediment for capitalism; conversely, when an enriched producer seized pro-
duction it opened up possibilities for revolutionary transformation. This is what happened
with the putting-out system.
(4) In sum, Marx opened up two areas of reflection on the subject. On the one hand, he
proposed the expropriation of the peasantry through violence, which refers to conflict and
social action. This explanation brought him closer to the question of class struggle, a cen-
tral category of his doctrine to understand the change from one mode of production to
another as brought forward in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx and Engels
1976). On the other hand, he alluded to the process of subsumption of labor by capital,
a process that must have developed in a rural context, thus aligning his argument with
the idea of structural economic transformation. While one explanation highlights the
idea of rupture, in the other capitalist transformation would have occurred within a frame-
work of greater continuity.
(5) In order to understand rural domestic industry, Marx should have studied village
documents. There, even if he could not have observed the process of subsumption of
labor by capital in its entirety (a difficult question to grasp considering that the new entre-
preneur was a simple villager who did not always leave a mark on the documents), he
could have established the conditions of possibility for that process to occur. But those
documents were not available to him. To counter this shortcoming, his most extensive
analysis on the subject is based on English general dispositions for the poor and vaga-
bonds. The problem is that those decrees show the process from above and as a question
of social discipline, while what we need in regard to this matter is to look underneath the
political surface.

A Case Study on the Genesis of Capitalism

It has already been stated that rural capitalist manufacturing emerged and persisted in
places with consolidated feudal rule. Such was the situation in Eastern Europe, Russia,
Sicily, and Castile (Myska 1996; Ogilvie 1996a, 28–30; 1996b, 123–125; 1997, 40–42,
403ff.; Rudolf 1985; Epstein 1991, 1992). We shall focus our attention in this last region,
especially in the central portion south of the river Duero, where rural manufacturing
emerged between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries (Iradiel Murugarren 1974,
1983).
This was an area marked by the war between Christians and Muslims. These circum-
stances prompted the emergence of communities that were autonomous in principle
(the so-called “concejos” of Ávila, Salamanca, Segovia, Cuenca, and others); within those
communities, the knights accumulated wealth by virtue of their participation in the war.
From the first half of the thirteenth century onward, when the region became pacified
as the Christian-Muslim frontier moved further south, three distinct social levels appear.
The first level was that of the lord of the concejo (council), generally the king, who collected
taxes from the peasantry in the same way that a feudal lord would have done. The second
stratum was that of the knights who, besides riches, obtained from the monarch privileges
4 C. ASTARITA

that exempted them from taxation. In addition, they took control of city governance and
constituted a small local aristocracy whose social status was close to that of the lower ranks
of the nobility (Astarita 1982; Monsalvo Antón 1990). Due to this proximity to the nobility
(some of them aspired to the status of noblemen), to the consequent fact that they were
subject to a series of norms that limited the number of dependents they could have
(which was meant to preserve the group knights) and also because they took up sheep
farming for wool, an activity of noblemen, these urban knights would not bring about a
capitalist economy even if they exploited wage labor (Pastor de Togneri 1970). They
can therefore be classified as belonging to a regime of simple commodity production
devoid of transitional functions and subordinated to feudalism. The third stratum was
constituted by craftsmen and peasants who inhabited the outskirts of the city and the vil-
lages of its hinterland. Taxation fell on them, and it is within this social stratum that rural
manufacturing originated. Let’s look at the conditions of this section of society.
Villages were marked by a process of social differentiation. A large portion of the pea-
santry became destitute, in part because feudal lords and urban knights seized common
lands to use them for sheep breeding.3 This trend, which was already present at the begin-
ning of the fourteenth century, accelerated from 1337 onwards, when the Hundred Years
War interrupted the export of wool from England to Flanders and Castile became the lar-
gest center of wool exports (Astarita 1992). The appropriation of common lands curtailed
the daily reproduction of the peasantry (to the extent that communal land was an indis-
pensable auxiliary of the peasant economy) and obstructed the installation of new hold-
ings, which complicated the situation of many heirs. As a consequence, the number of
smallholdings increased. Peasants could also fall into poverty due to bad crops or judicial
fines. Widows were an especially vulnerable segment, since the death of the husband dras-
tically diminished the labor force in their units of production, to which was added the
difficulty of remarrying due both to the influence of the church, which did not encourage
the practice, and to the customs of the community. The loss of land was a frequent occur-
rence in this segment of society.4
These circumstances brought about the emergence of two types of marginalized people.
The first type was that of the completely dispossessed, thrown into vagabondage, as
reflected in the Cortes of Castile and León (i.e. the estates parliament) (Real Academia
de la Historia 1866, 1351, 1369, 1435, 1469; See also Grice Hutchinson 1982; López Alonso
1986; Martz 1983). The second type was that of smallholders, and this type is the one that
matters in the explanation of the genesis of rural manufacture. On the one hand, this pea-
sant was too poor to afford to pay rent to the lord (a situation that was contemplated in the
law); on the other hand, in order to survive, he began to work for the knights or for rich
peasants.
These rich peasants (who could also be craftsmen) controlled the village communities
and collaborated in the collection of the lord’s rents (Astarita 2005, 113ff.). Taking advan-
tage of their position, and with the lord’s support, they paid proportionally less rent than
the rest, which contributed to their economic consolidation. This segment owned vine-
yards, lands for cereal, livestock, fruit trees, and so on, and hired wage workers among
this impoverished stratum of smallholders who resided in the village. Thus, a regime of
mercantile production emerged which, unlike the one formed by urban knights, was
not integrated into the activities of the nobility. In these conditions, at one point or
another the rich peasant began to provide wool so that the poor villager—who had always
 INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 5

woven cloth in his loom for his own consumption—would weave cloth for the rich peasant
to sell in the market (Astarita 2005, 160ff.). This is how the village manufacturing entre-
preneur came to be (known in Castile as señor del paño [the “lord of the cloth”]) and with
him the first form of subordination of labor by capital or purchase system (Kaufsystem). In
a later development, the same rich peasant could install the loom, thus providing not only
the raw material, but also the means of production. This was the Verlagssystem that Marx
and Engels considered the first form of capitalist production (Marx 1976, vol. 3, 914
[Engels’s preface]).5
This production regime did not impair or diminish the incomes of the lord of the coun-
cil because the manufacturing worker had already stopped paying rent as a consequence of
his poverty. On the other hand, the lord benefited in that he collected market rights for the
sale of the cloth.6 It is understandable, then, that the lords promoted the installation of
looms for the poor to work on (Asenjo González 1991, 7).

Comparing Cases and Explanations

It can be inferred from the above that the weakness of the feudal system was not a requisite
for the genesis of the new regime of production. Quite to the contrary, the lord continued
to receive rents from the mid-size peasant, a surplus that contributed to the impoverish-
ment of some peasants and to the formation of the first proletariat. This highlights one
difference with regard to what Marx proposed in Das Kapital.
In that work, the general historical process of the transition is synthesized in differen-
tiated stages as follows: a) feudalism; b) dissolution of feudalism; and c) genesis of the new
capitalist regime. Maurice Dobb (1946) followed this scheme of three distinct logics: he
proposed that there was a decline of feudalism which was in turn the precondition for
the emergence of capitalism. Other historians later reiterated this argument when noting
that manufacturing was curtailed in places where feudal lords and city councils had the
power to coerce, and therefore these activities developed in marginal areas or where lord-
ship was in decline (Kriedte, Medick, and Schlumbohm 1981).
Contrary to those interpretations, case studies show that manufacturing appeared in
areas where feudalism was fully functioning. Therefore, those areas had only one dialecti-
cally contradictory logic for the reproduction of feudalism on the one hand and the genesis
of capitalism on the other.7
Another aspect is that the expropriation of some peasants was not total but partial in
that the peasants who became the first proletarians remained in the village with a very
small landholding, such as an orchard. It was also frequent for them to be granted rights
of usufruct over communal lands. This permanence in the village is of fundamental impor-
tance insofar as they could work different jobs that guaranteed subsistence while acquiring
the skills of the labor routine. They were also subject to the supervision and control of the
rich peasant who ran the community and had, as employer, the right to apply physical
coercion (which could include mutilation) on the hired worker. Thus, a kind of work dis-
cipline was established that would have been very difficult to achieve with marginalized
vagabonds: sources of the period and research show that this last type of worker was
unstable everywhere and combined occasional work with crime (Geremek 1976). In
view of this, we can question whether that excluded marginal could be considered “a
reserve army of labor” for capital.8 In one sense he was, as demonstrated by the fact
6 C. ASTARITA

that he jumped in and out of the workforce and by the day laborers of the Later Middle
Ages who got hired at the town square at the beginning of the day. Both did occasional
work provided by feudal lords and rich villagers, and in this sense they must have consti-
tuted the reserve army of the new system. However, the difficulties inherent to their hiring
must have diminished their economic importance. Even in the first half of the twentieth
century, some areas in England where capitalist transformation was advancing at a rapid
pace had two types of occasional wage workers: those who were adapted to the demands of
capital and those who were not at all. A worker who experienced this process first hand for
having been a direct participant in it has told us as much (Kitchen 1981). Let’s return to
the Middle Ages.
The considerations mentioned here lead us to appreciate the importance of the auton-
omy of the rich villager (who often owned lands in different villages) in the formation of
the new mode of production. Since he had the community under his control, he could
manage relations with the lord, negotiate the salaries to be paid (when hiring working
men for the vineyards, for example), impose working conditions, regulate the use of com-
munal lands where he carried out small-scale enclosures, and invest profits as he saw fit,
which was a decisive factor in the emergence of an intensive reproduction of rural
domestic manufacturing (Astarita 1997, 2005; Da Graca 2009). This autonomy of the
rich villager derived from the conditions created by feudalism, which was an aggregate
of private sovereignties. The importance of this factor becomes apparent when compared
with the villages of al-Andalus, that is to say, with the Islamic Arabic region of the Iberian
Peninsula that was subject to a non-feudal taxation system. Unlike what happened in
feudalism, the villages of al-Andalus had councils of elders who wielded little authority
and power was in the hands of a representative of the state (Malpica Cuello 1990).
Here there was no dispossession of peasants, no purchase of labor, and neither was
there capitalism.
It is necessary to clarify that not all Western feudal communities presented the con-
ditions favorable to the emergence of the new system. A relatively high circulation of
money and merchandise as well as cash rents, used in the lands under the jurisdiction
of the king, were some of the conditions that enabled the development of markets and
wages. Another condition was the sharp social differentiation created by the village
entrepreneur who owned between 20 and 24 hectares, which was made even sharper
by the fact that the poor peasant who did not own the minimum amount of land
would stop paying rent and become available to be hired as a wage worker. This situ-
ation did not occur, for example, in the forms of lordship knows as “behetrías” in
Northern Spain (Da Graca 2009). In other places it becomes apparent that capitalist
manufacturing only emerged under certain conditions. In the Italian region of Tuscany,
for example, the leasing contracts (mezzadria) did not leave the tenant spare time to
become employed in rural manufacturing while, in contrast, rural manufacturing
emerged in Sicily where there was a strong predominance of landowners (Epstein
1986, 1991, 1992). The rural manufacturing that did exist in Tuscany, the spinning
operations, ended up dependent on the large urban manufacturers who engaged in tra-
ditional guild production (Franceschi 1993).
Thus, under certain conditions, feudalism gave rise to capitalist production in its initial
phase. However, this did not guarantee its subsequent evolution.
 INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 7

Class Struggle and the Transition

As it developed, the initial compatibility between the feudal system and the first form of
capitalism would show its contradictory nature, and it is here that we see the different pos-
sibilities that social struggle presented for economic evolution. Let us analyze this matter.
We have seen that, with the sales tax on cloth, the lord compensated for the lost revenue
of the rents that the peasant had ceased to pay. But precisely at this point of coalescence
between the lord and the capitalist entrepreneur lay a source of conflict, because, as the
new regime became widespread, the rights of the lord became a hindrance. We then
find ourselves observing antagonism between the feudal and capitalist modes of pro-
duction, such as the one that became manifest in England during the Revolution of
1381, which was mainly led by rich peasants (Dyer 1984; Hilton 1973).
Besides the obstacles caused by market rights, in Castile and León there were other even
more serious ones affecting the development of manufacturing. Wool exports meant that
the manufacturer did not have enough raw material available, while cloth imported from
abroad reduced their sales market. From the beginning of the fifteenth century, producers
manifested their opposition to this trade in the parliament (Cortes) and in writings, and
they ended up expressing themselves in the revolution of the Castilian communities of
1520–1521 (even if this economic situation was not the only cause of these uprisings)
(Real Academia de la Historia 1866, 18, 340, 721; Benito Ruano 1975; Perez 1977).9
The defeat of the comuneros in the battle of Villalar at the hands of feudal lords (who
were supported by the exporter merchants of Burgos) determined the continuity of feud-
alism, of the trade system, and of the blockade of Castilian manufacturing (Smith 2007,
book V, ch. 2).10 In England, however, although in 1381 the revolution was defeated, in
the long run capitalist accumulators achieved a good number of their demands, which
paved the way for capitalism (Kominsky 1957; Rigby 2007). Toward the end of the
fifteenth century, England became an exporter of “popular” cloth to European markets
(that is to say, cloth produced by rural manufacturing), which meant an absolute change
in its trading position as since during the thirteenth century England had been a center of
wool exports and cloth imports from the Flemish region.
We can therefore conclude that class struggle was not the first movement of the tran-
sition, but that it did have a relevant role in the elimination of obstacles that hindered the
development of the new system of production. This leads us to consider the historical fac-
tors conditioning these struggles.

Reconsidering Commune Movements

We all know that bourgeois rebellions broke out in many European cities starting in the
middle of the eleventh century, and nineteenth-century historians considered that these
struggles constituted a distant initial stage of the English revolutionary period of the
1640s and the French one of 1789–1830 (Thierry 1884a, 1884b). This point of view was
partially picked up by Henri Pirenne in the early decades of the twentieth century,
although Pirenne (1910) reduced the significance of these rebellions in the rise of the bour-
geoisie and assigned more importance to trade.
While Pirenne’s interpretation gained acceptance among historians in its time, from the
beginning it was subject to criticism related to both the historical facts and the theory on
8 C. ASTARITA

which it was based (regarding the theoretical aspects, an important consideration was
Marx’s view of merchant capital in the pre-capitalist period as parasitic capital that suc-
tioned value without transforming the system) (Derville 1985; Dobb 1946; Doehaerd
1947; Marx 1976, vol. 3, 607ff.). Despite the fact that Pirenne’s ascendancy never disap-
peared from historiography, today’s historians do not accept his thesis on the commercial
origins of capitalism. Neither is it accepted that communal revolutions initiated the change
in the feudal system. It is now agreed that the bourgeoisie of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries wanted to arrogate urban government for themselves, and that they rebelled
when bishops and abbots thwarted their objective. This new vision of the communal
struggles, which drastically diminished their historical importance, led medievalists to
sideline these rebellions.11
However, this point of view needs to be revised because those conflicts exerted influence
on at least two levels. On the one hand, over time they fostered the development of the so-
called “civil society.” In other words (following Gramsci’s concepts), they enabled the
burgeoning of private organizations that intervened, then and now, in “political society”
(i.e. in the State), a notion demonstrated by historians who partially adhered to the
tradition of Thierry and Pirenne.12 On the other hand, they contributed know-how on
mobilization that must have been picked up somehow by capitalist accumulators of
later periods in order to confront feudalism. The memory of a struggle is hard to banish
from social memory, and regarding this matter we must consider some particular charac-
teristics of peasant rebellions.
One of those characteristics is that they were led by the bourgeoisie, that is to say, by the
upper echelon of the lord’s dependents.13 These were generally craftsmen or well-to-do
merchants who owned lands in the areas surrounding the cities, which indicates that social
differentiation was under way from the eleventh century onward, and that it intensified in
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In many places those bourgeois must have forged a
regime of petty commodity production within a social and economic formation in
which the seigneurial regime predominated. This is a question to keep in mind, since
many times historians have analyzed this mercantile system in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries while ignoring its presence in an earlier period.
Not only the bourgeois participated in these struggles for the communes; various sec-
tions of the people also took part (apprentices, poor craftsmen, officers, and others). In the
lands of the monastic estate of Sahagún in the twelfth century, the peasants rebelled along
with the bourgeois and other townspeople, and this caused the struggle to become radica-
lized with attacks on estates (those of the king as well as those belonging to lay and eccle-
siastical lords) (Fernández Flórez 1991, document 1231; Puyol y Alonso 1920, ch. 19). It
should be added that due to the monastery’s stubborn refusal to grant autonomy to the
bourgeois of Sahagún (even when they were granted the right to have their own council,
the abbot still interfered in municipal matters), the uprisings continued into the Later
Middle Ages.
This type of experience must have been transmitted to other areas; at the very least, in
Castile and León (although news traveled beyond the Pyrenees), no one would have been
unaware that violent rebellions against the lords had broken out in Sahagún, Santiago de
Compostela, and Lugo. In view of this, confrontations of another magnitude and clearly
anti-feudal such as the Irmandiño wars of Galician peasants between 1467 and 1469, or
 INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 9

the revolution of the Castilian communities of 1520–1521, tied into a sequence of social
movements.
England, the other place that has drawn our attention, also had its own communal
struggles, but here they were more closely connected with the anti-feudal rising of 1381.
This closer connection is primarily due to the historical moment in that the rebellions
against the church took place mainly in the Late Middle Ages in places like St Albans,
Cambridge, and Bury St Edmunds. In those places, the bourgeois demanded autonomy
but they also pronounced themselves against feudal rights. In St Albans, for example,
the revolts included the rejection of the lord’s mill and the defense of the domestic
mills (in Sahagún, an initial stage of the struggle of the early twelfth century also featured
the rejection of the compulsory use of the lord’s oven, and by means of a tribute the pea-
sants acquired the right to use their own oven) (Herrero de la Fuente 1988, document 974,
year 1096; Riley 1864). The difference is that in St Albans this struggle became closely
linked to the rising of 1381. But perhaps the situation that presents the most interesting
aspects is that of St Edmunds.
In the year 1327, the bourgeois rebelled against the abbot (along with those of St Albans
and other places), taking advantage of the insurrection that broke out in London when
Edward III ascended the throne in the midst of political crisis (in fact, London delegates
had a major role in spreading the rebellion) (Riley 1864). The unrest at Bury St Edmunds
escalated, due in part to the behavior of the abbot (Arnold 1892, 340ff.). He was attending
Parliament when the conflict erupted. Alarmed by its violence, he returned to restore
order, but was forced to yield to the bourgeois’ demand to have their own charter.
With the excuse of ratifying the agreement, the abbot returned to London and reneged
on the pact as soon as he arrived. As a result, the rebellion became more radicalized
and the bourgeois proclaimed their freedom from seigneurial rights in all the district,
including the tithe and the cult dues.
The rebels were defeated this time around, but their struggle set the stage for the one
that took place in 1381. During the revolution of 1381, the rebels (townsfolk and peasants)
charged against the monastery of St Edmunds prompted by the bourgeois, who kept them-
selves at a distance from the crowd (Riley 1864, 3). According to the chronicler, this was a
ploy to avoid being involved in the crime of sedition, although it should be noted that they
exhibited skill to mobilize others in the pursuit of their own agenda. Let’s return to Bury St
Edmunds in 1327.
The liberation from rents that the burgesses decreed that year, which included the elim-
ination of transport tolls and the abolition of labor service, spread a message to all the vas-
sals of East Anglia regardless of their legal condition (free or unfree) (Arnold 1892, 334).
Their vision went beyond the boundaries of their manor, and in this we must bring to bear
the characteristics of the county of Suffolk where the monastery was located.
This county had more manufacturing and more urban density than most other counties
in England as well as relatively high levels of trade. This had resulted in the emergence of
economic strategies for improvements and innovation to increase the efficiency of cash
crops (Bailey 2010; Dyer 1998). The bourgeoisie had good business prospects there,
which became expressed institutionally in the organization (during the twelfth century)
of a merchants’ guild. The sexton often consulted with their representative, the alderman,
on matters related to the borough. Nevertheless, this alderman did not have an official role
10 C. ASTARITA

and the bourgeoisie lacked formal structures of government; indeed, the sexton could even
veto the designation of an alderman by the bourgeois, which was a source of disputes.
This situation confirms the argument of this analysis in that it shows that economic
development under feudalism created the protagonist of the struggle against feudalism. It
also allows us to see that those struggles of the Later Middle Ages did not arise out of noth-
ing; quite to the contrary, they had significant precedents that in some cases, such as the one
mentioned earlier, had a direct link with the anti-system revolution. Let’s recapitulate.

Conclusions

(1) The central question of the transition posed by Marx remains valid. It centers on
understanding how the peasant lost his means of production to become a
proletarian.
(2) We must dispel the notion that the proletariat arose from the vagabonds and the
decline of feudalism. The first proletariat arose from the reproduction of feudalism
in the form of a semi-proletarian with residence in the villages. This was accompanied
by social polarization that allowed for the emergence of rich peasants and capitalist
accumulators. In this genesis, lordship and the new system were compatible.
(3) What started out as compatible became contradictory as the capitalist regime took
hold. The capitalist accumulator needed to free himself from the feudal taxation
that hindered his development, and this is where class struggle surfaced. The outcome
of that struggle defined to a large extent the development of each country, as evi-
denced by the economies of England and Castile in the long term.
(4) Those struggles must have been informed by previous experiences. They did not rise
out of passivity but quite the opposite: they had precedents in the communal insur-
rections against church prohibitions that started in the second half of the eleventh
century. Therefore, even though those insurrections did not bring about the first
capitalism (as argued by classical historians are liberal historians like Augustin
Thierry and Henri Pirenne), they did indeed contribute to its advent by bequeathing
a tradition of struggle and by fostering the attributes of civil society. What is more, in
some cases they directly joined the anti-feudal struggles that paved the way for capi-
talist accumulators.
(5) The transition from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production was a combination
of structural dynamics and social action. Feudalism gave rise to the new mode of pro-
duction and its social subject, the village entrepreneur, who, in turn, reacted against
the structure that spawned him by trying to eliminate it. This conclusion brings us
back to Marx by combining his two overarching visions on historical change: struc-
tural dynamics and class struggle, albeit, as shown in the discussion here, with
some corrections and adjustments in light of current research.

Notes
1. For a general overview of this issue see Seccombe (1995); to the contrary, Marx (1976, vol. 1,
453) believed that those cast out from the land joined fledgling manufacturing operations.
 INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 11

2. This gave rise to opposing views: Some authors considered that capitalism had developed in
Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries, for example, Rutenburg (1966, 1971), while others
denied that this development took place (such as Melis 1966). For theoretical aspects, see
Procacci (1955).
3. The paragraphs below summarize the research contained in Astarita (2005, 151ff.). The
documents studied date from the 13th to the 16th centuries and correspond to municipalities
and religious institutions in Ávila, Sepúlveda, Zamora, Ledesma, Madrid, Cuellar, Riaza, Sal-
amanca, Mombeltrán, Alba de Tormes, Villalpando and Santa Clara de Villalobos in Zamora,
Ciudad Rodrigo, Segovia, Cuenca, Piedrahíta, and the villages of Ávila de San Bartolomé de
Pinares, Villatoro, La Adrada, Candelada, Higuera de las Dueñas and Sotillo de la Adrada.
4. Thirty percent of those who sold land in the 14th century in the area of Cuenca were widows
(Sánchez Benito 1994, 134).
5. On the difference between Kaufsystem and Verlagssystem see Kriedte, Medick, and Schlum-
bohm (1981). Schlumbohm in particular considers Verlagssystem as a capitalist form.
6. In Zamora, where there was no Verlagssystem but a system of small producers who sold to
merchants, between 1477 and 1495 the sales tax for cloth increased from 80,000 maravedíes
to 188,000 and the taxes on spun wool sold for weaving doubled. Circulation taxes only give
us an approximate idea of the true importance of rural manufacturing since many operations
evaded controls (Iradiel Murugarren 1974, 338; 1995, 528–529). Regarding this for the case of
England, see Dyer (2000, 304–27).
7. The concept of only one contradictory logic was proposed by Bois (1976), albeit within a
theoretical framework influenced by Malthus and Ricardo that the author applied in combi-
nation with Marxian concepts. Bois’ analysis of the movement of feudalism in phases of
demographic expansion and contraction from which wage labor emerged has been an influ-
ence in the study of the origins of Verlagssystem. See Kriedte (1980).
8. This question was suggested by one of the referees of this article.
9. Also, rich peasants led the revolt in the countryside (Gutiérrez Nieto 1973).
10. A matter summarized by Smith (2007, 700): “It is to the alcabala [merchandise trade tax] . . .
the ruin of the manufactures of Spain.” See also García Sanz (1977).
11. Examples of histories of the Middle Ages that deny the importance of the revolutions of med-
ieval communities: Monsalvo Antón (1997), Baschet (2009), and Wickham (2016).
12. These historians were Kofler (1948) and Romero (1967).
13. This is observed in different chronicles. See for example, on the rebellion of the bourgeois of
Cologne in 1074, Migne (1878b); on the rebellion of Sahagún between 1110 and 1117, see
Puyol y Alonso (1920); on the one in Santiago de Compostela in the year 1117, see Migne
(1878a).

Acknowledgements
This article was translated by Ana Ras from Los Angeles, California, USA.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributor
Carlos Astarita is a professor of Medieval History at the University of Buenos Aires and University
of La Plata. He has specialized in the economic and social history of the Middle Ages. His published
works include Desarrollo desigual en los orígenes del capitalismo (Buenos Aires, 1992), Del feuda-
lismo al capitalismo (Valencia, 2005), and approximately 70 papers in specialized journals.
12 C. ASTARITA

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