Saturday following Eurovision, Hot Fuzz and the Greater Good
Marx’s Theory of Land, Rent and Cities
Munro, Don
Bringing together Marx’s original writings on land, rent and the landed property class, this book applies them to contemporary cities in the Global North and Global South. The book shows how landed property, and not just labour and capital, directly affects urban economic development, the built environment, urban governance and the quality of life of people living in cities. It also shows how land, rent and class transform cities in different ways depending on the indigenous, Asiatic, feudal, capitalist or other modes of production that mould the form and substance of cities. Presenting a new comparative approach, this book provides novel insights into the origins of, and solutions to, many of today’s urban problems including urban enclosures, exclusive property development, the financialisation of land, land grabbing, and climate change.
“https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/60229”
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CHAPTER 4
Feudal, Capitalist and Communist Land
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural …1
Introduction
This chapter gives an overview of the characteristics of the feudal, capitalist and communist modes of production; their particular forms of urban landed property, rent and the state; and the contradictory social relations within these modes of production that cause them and their cities to change. It challenges the views of economists and political scientists who claim that Marx’s findings are only relevant to capitalist societies, that he under-theorised the nature of communist societies and/or he had little to say about the relation between economics and cities. In part, this misunderstanding has arisen because of the general tendency of scholars and activists to focus only on Marx’s writings on labour and capital and their relations within capitalism. This is understandable given Marx’s main objective was to develop a critique of the political economy of capitalism.
However, as this book shows, when Marx’s considerable writings on land are included, it is clear he provided a far more sophisticated critique of capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production, especially feudalism and communism, than is normally appreciated.
The distinction between communities and societies
It may be recalled from Chapter 2 that Marx’s methodology recognises there is no single general theory of economics or politics and no universal concepts (such as land and rent) that have unchanging characteristics irrespective of the society within which they play a part. These concepts, institutions and practices always vary depending on the particulars of the society under investigation: they are always context-dependent.
One of the important particulars identified by Marx is the difference between Gemeinschaft — communities where community membership is based on shared ancestry and communal ownership of land (as was shown with the indigenous, ancient and Asiatic communities) — and Gesellschaft — societies where societal membership is based on a shared geography and there is individual ownership of land.
Societies, Marx argued, with their particular modes of production, types of governance and social values originated in central Europe in the Middle Ages and, over the centuries, developed into social formations based on feudal, capitalist and communist modes of production. Incidentally, one of the founders of German sociology, Ferdinand Tönnies, subsequently took Marx’s concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft and developed them,2 as did his colleague Max Weber.
Societies in Europe originated from indigenous groups such as the Celtic, Slavic and Germanic-speaking peoples who conquered much of the Roman Empire and ended its ancient mode of production. These groups destroyed many Roman-built buildings, machinery and other productive forces; oversaw the decline in agriculture; and witnessed the decay of industry, transport and trade. As a result, the former Roman regions of central and northern Europe saw a decrease in the size of their rural and urban populations.3
Dispersed thinly across a large geographical area,4 these populations lived in self-sufficient, scattered peasant families and groups of families that were not necessarily related. These groups were led by a warrior chief who also lived in the same forests and worked the same agricultural land as the others.5
These groups comprised people from many different ethnic backgrounds, all of whom had an equal right to a proportionate share of the land occupied by the group — a situation that ‘created a sense of individual self-respect and mutual dependence’.6
Given the extended geographical reach of these societies, the isolation of its inhabitants and their dependence on strangers, these early societies organised their governance, trade and other forms of social intercourse on the basis of written laws, impersonal contracts, societal institutions and democratic polities (unlike the reliance on personal trust, mutual obligations and kinship responsibilities expressed as impersonal agreements, oaths and promises between kin and clan members which were the basis of Gemeinschaft communities).
Although he did not mention in his published writings how it was possible that the illiterate people of Europe of the time came to rely on formal, impersonal, legalistic and written documents, in his Ethnological Notebooks Marx speculated that the church (which dominated the lives of European Christendom at this time) may have been the source of the materials and skills needed to produce such documents given that ‘The Will, the Contract, and the Separate Ownership were in fact indispensable to the Church as the donee of pious gifts’.7
These early societies have three distinctive characteristics.
First, there is the obligation of all members of the society to help those from their own region who face difficulties. That is, the society arose, in part, through the establishment of mutual surety (collective responsibility for each other) and the establishment of the associations of mutual support. For example, Marx discusses the Dithmarschen, a district in Germany which, from the thirteenth century to 1559, was an independent peasants’ republic with a strong culture and practice of both self-sufficiency and communal obligations to help others who were disadvantaged.8
Second, the society has an ager publicus, communal or people’s land, which took the form of land used by the society members for hunting, timber production, fishing and so on. This public land differs from the individual land owned and used by peasants in that the communal land could not be subdivided and could be used by all society members. In other words, the ager publicus is ‘a complement to individual property, and figures as property only to the extent that it is defended militarily as the common property of one tribe against a hostile tribe’.9
Third, and a defining characteristic of these societies, is that they had a participative form of governance. The politically equal members of the society would meet together in communal meetings to make communal decisions about matters that affected their society (such as war, legal deliberations, religious obligations and so on). This direct, participatory coming together of free and independent landholders (peasant farmers) to make communal decisions is very different from Gemeinschaft communities where city-states or a unitary ruler made political decisions for the community on behalf of the community. In societies, instead of establishing polities that were institutionally separate from its members, politics consisted of participatory democratic practice where there was ‘the periodic gathering-together [Vereinigung] of the commune members … a coming-together [Vereinigung], not as a being-together [Verein]; as a unification made up of independent subjects, landed proprietors, and not as a unity’.10
The main differences between feudal, capitalist and communist societies and the indigenous, ancient and Asiatic communities are summarised in Table 4.1. Marx only briefly discusses how, over time, these small groupings of self-sufficient, scattered peasant families and groupings of households came to establish the feudal mode of production.11 The small family groups, households and clans were forced by war and political alliances into larger groups living in and ruling over larger territories. The leaders, through war and marriage, established themselves as the landed nobility with a monarch at its head. The once self-sufficient peasantry came to be dependent on the (monarch’s) land and became serfs, agricultural workers who worked on the land and were legally ‘tied’ to the land such that, if the land was conquered or transferred to another landowner, responsibility for the serfs on that land was transferred to the new landowner.
Feudal mode of production
The feudal mode of production is stereotypically considered to be structured by two social relations based on the ownership and rent of land: vassalage and manorialism.12
The ruling monarch (the personification of the feudal state) is the owner of all land in the realm, often on the justification of holding the land on Earth on behalf of God. However, because the feudal ruler is militarily, economically, politically and fiscally weak,13 the ruler had little choice but to seek the support of other members of the feudal aristocracy. To bolster their position and their political and fiscal strength, feudal rulers often (but not always)14 establish a social relation (of vassalage) with lesser nobles, where the ruler grants large estates of land (fiefs) to the lesser nobles to rule over in return for fealty (a formal acknowledgement of loyalty to the ruler), military support to the ruler when needed, and the payment of rent for the land.
The second social relation of landed property that structures the feudal mode of production and feudal societies is manorialism. Manorialism is the economic relationship between landlords (the noble vassals) and the direct producers (the serfs). In this social (economic) relation, the landlord provides the serf with protection, justice and the ‘privilege’ to cultivate certain fields within their manor in exchange for the payment of rent.15
The landlord would keep part of that rent for their own use (or wealth) and remit the remainder to the feudal ruler as part of their vassalage obligations. Both these social relations of vassalage and manorialism are contradictory. For example, the interests of the ruling monarchs (who need to defend their territorial boundaries, maintain their position in society, exert power over their vassals and maximise the extraction of military service and rent from their vassals) conflict with the interests of the vassals (who need to exercise their own power over their fiefs, manage their relations with competitive vassals, control their enserfed workforce and maximise the appropriation of rent from that workforce, and minimise the payment of military service and rent to their rulers).
Similarly, there is a clear economic dependence and antagonism between the owners of landed property and their direct producers. Landlords rely on the serfs to work their large estates, and serfs need the landlord to allocate land to them so they can live. Likewise, the landlord is under pressure from their vassalage obligations to maximise the amount of rent they can appropriate from the direct producers while the serfs want to keep all the surplus they produce for themselves.
Over the centuries, these contradictory social relations expressed themselves in different ways. The contradictions within the social relations of vassalage promoted landowner revolts against the ruling monarch, royal retaliation against traitorous nobles, and, in jurisdictions such as England, the use of Parliament to limit the taxation and other powers of the kings over their vassals. Similarly, the contradictions in manorialism could be seen with serfs and landlords taking each other to court, labour strikes by the serfs (especially in times of war or plague when there were labour shortages), lockouts by landlords, and the development of new agricultural technologies to make labouring easier, reduce labour costs and improve productivity.
This general picture of the feudal mode of production, a self-reinforcing land-based system of economic manorialism and political vassalage, is now understood to be too simplistic to capture all the particulars of feudalism in the real world.16 It is beyond the scope of this book to assess the many variants of feudalism, but it should be noted that feudalism has existed in various forms around the world including in China (fēngjiàn) beginning around 1,000 BCE, India (fourth to eleventh century), 17 Europe (ninth to thirteenth centuries) and medieval Japan (twelfth to seventeenth century), and continues to exist in several of today’s Middle Eastern nations (see Table 1.2). Furthermore, in Europe at least, there were multiple other social relations of production between many different stakeholders (rather than just vassal-age and manorialism). For example, the church was a major landowner: the church ‘is said to have owned between one-fourth and one-third of the land of western Europe’ which it used for its own agricultural, manufacturing and commercial enterprises.18 In addition, as will be discussed below, medieval cities were centres of economic and political power that often had to defend their municipal territory, governing council, urban economy and their autonomy by developing strategic alliances with the ruling monarch and against the local ruling vassal.
Feudal rent
In feudal societies, there were three forms of rent. All rent is a portion of the unpaid surplus labour provided by the direct producer (peasant, serf, labourer, slave and so on) which is appropriated by the landowner for the use of their land.
However, in the feudal mode of production, rent could be paid in three different forms —
as surplus labour (labour-rent);
as surplus product (also called rent in kind); and
as money-rent.
Marx discusses these at length in chapter 47 of volume III of Capital.19
Marx calls labour rent ‘the simplest and most primitive form of rent’.20
Typically, this form of rent (compulsorily provided, unpaid, surplus labour, or corvée) arises when direct producers (serfs and their families) use their own instruments of labour (plough, cattle, etc.), which actually or legally belong to them, to cultivate a plot of the landlord’s soil which they lease as their own and in return, they must work upon the estate of the feudal lord, under the control of the feudal lord, and without any compensation from the feudal lord, for a period of time. A variation occurs when the direct producer provides unpaid labour intermittently and for limited periods of time (such as a number of weeks’ work each season) for the landlord. The direct producer is autonomous and independent when they apply their own labour to their own land with their own technology. They have control over their working hours and conditions; they determine what to produce for their own sustenance (and the sustenance of their family); and they own any surplus-to-sustenance products and decide how they will use or dispose of their property. On the other hand, all the obligatory, unpaid, additional labour that the direct producer provides for the benefit of the landowner is surplus labour in the sense that it is additional to the necessary labour the direct producer needs to apply for their own subsistence. Marx noted a characteristic of labour-rent is that it is an obligatory payment made in return for the use of the landlord’s land which is paid in the form of labour-time.
In these social relations between the direct producer and the landlord, institutionalised in the lease arrangement, the direct producer has a relatively large degree of power. This power exists because, although the landowner owns the land, the direct producer possesses their own means of production (such as tools and equipment, seed and livestock). As a result, the direct producer is not tied to a single landowner and there is the potential for the direct producer to ‘shop around’ between competing landowners for a good land leasing agreement. In addition, by possessing their own tools, machinery and materials, the direct producer has a high degree of control over how they work to produce their own means of subsistence and how they manufacture their family-produced domestic handicrafts.
The direct producer, in other words, can work and produce in ways that are independent of the control of the landowner, except when they must provide labour rent. On the other hand, because the direct producer can work and produce independently of the landlord, the landholder needs the backing of various sources of power to enforce their economic interests.
First, the landowner needs some political or other backing to strengthen their bargaining position and influence the magnitude of the labour rent being demanded by the landlord.
Second, the landowner needs the power, where necessary, to ensure the direct producer complies with the lease arrangement and provides their surplus labour to the benefit of the landholder.
In both cases, the landowner could enforce the lease arrangement through the use of economic powers (such as by establishing workplace controls and directly overseeing the work of the direct producer) and through the application of non-economic sources of power such as enforcement by the state (such as imprisonment for breaking the law); the promise of religious merit to be provided by cultural institutions; and, when necessary, the direct use of extrajudicial violence by the landholder against the serf.
The second form of rent identified by Marx which developed in the feudal mode of production was surplus-product rent, also called rent-in-kind.
Here, the direct producer pays the landlord for access to and the use of the landlord’s land by providing a volume of surplus goods as rent. The surplus-product rent may consist of a quantity of agricultural produce grown on the land by the serf, products they have fabricated in their home as domestic industry or handicraft makers, or a combination of both.
There is a significant benefit for the direct producer if they can pay rent as surplus-product rent rather than labour rent. With surplus-product rent, the tenant works independently of the landowner. The tenant uses land directly to cultivate their own plants or livestock, and indirectly to convert their agricultural produce into manufactured handcrafts for their own use, for barter or for sale. The serf keeps what is needed for their own sustenance and the sustenance of their family, and to replace the tools and stores of materials they need for the following seasons; and provides a portion of the remaining, surplus-to-requirements products as unpaid, compulsory surplus-product rent to the landowner.21 If the tenant is able to grow, raise or manufacture an amount of surplus products that is in excess of what is needed for the rent, then that excess of surplus products that remain after the rent is paid (which in the capitalist mode of production will be called ‘profit’) can be accumulated by the peasant as wealth or be sold in the market for money.
Most importantly, although there is compulsion in both surplus-product rent and labour-rent, with surplus-product rent, how the work is carried out by the direct producer is determined by the direct producer and without the supervision or interference by the landlord or their representatives.
With labour-rent, on the other hand, the landowner directly supervises the tenant farmer to ensure the labour-rent hours of work are performed in full. Marx explains the difference by wryly saying that the seemingly independent direct producer is still forced to pay rent but ‘through legal enactment rather than the whip’.22
[the violence of money]
The third form of land-based rent that developed in the feudal mode of production is rent paid as money: money-rent.
Money-rent is ‘merely a changed form of rent in kind’ where, instead of paying the landlord with a number of hours of unpaid, surplus labour-time or an amount of unpaid surplus-products, the direct producer provides the landlord with an equivalent amount of cash.
[the vigorish?]
Cities and class
A new form of property — unlike landed property or personal property — was developed in the feudal mode of production, one that was inherently associated with towns and cities. Guilds (associations of tradespeople, professionals and merchants) were created in towns at a time when skilled labour was facing competition from the arrival of unskilled labour (escaped serfs) from the countryside. The legal rights, privileges and obligations of guilds were given and guaranteed by the municipal law of the city government and, in some instances, by the ruling monarch (through letters patent or other, similar royal imprimatur).
Essentially, guilds were monopolistic economic associations established to protect its members (share-holders) from competition: they were ‘sworn brotherhoods whose members were bound by their oaths to protect and serve one another’.23
Guilds established a new form of property called corporative or company property. Corporative property ‘consisted chiefly in the labour of each individual person’.24 However, although guilds were made up of individual members, these corporations were legal entities which had an existence which was independent of their members. As corporations, guilds had rights to own property, make contracts, employ labour, sue others (and be sued), have representatives carry out legal acts and be bound by obligations (such as to pay taxes) on behalf of the guild. The legal rights, privileges and obligations of guilds were often given and guaranteed under the municipal law of the city government where they were situated. In some instances, corporations were empowered and authorised by the ruling monarch (through letters patent or other, similar royal imprimatur) in return for their support of the crown.
Guild members were the wealthier town citizens, the burghers. These citizens typically were master artisans, tradespeople and craftsmen (such as weavers, dyers, masons, painters, metalsmiths, blacksmiths, armourers, bakers, butchers, leather-workers and cobblers); merchants (including retail and wholesale merchants); and traders (including inter-city traders). These urban-based traders, professionals and industrialists operated on a much larger scale than the domestic-scale industry carried out in peasant households, and unlike the peasant households that generally produced goods for their own needs, urban artisans and manufacturers (who were often also merchants) produced products for sale (rather than for their own use).
Corporative property brought four major benefits to the wealthy burghers that they could not achieve as individuals.
First, it allowed guild members to protect their buildings, tools and technology, materials and products from theft or appropriation by the landed nobility who dominated feudal societies. Uniting together into a legal association with a legal status, rights, privileges and duties gave the guilds (and their members) a degree of state protection which they could not necessarily achieve as individuals. For this legal status and protection by the state, in a quid pro quo, the guild paid corporate taxes imposed by the municipal council or, if the guild was formed under letters patent, the guild paid corporate taxes to the monarch.
Second, as an association of employers, guilds helped members to protect their own livelihoods. By taking a unified approach to the regulation of wages and working conditions of their employees, guilds could undermine the industrial claims of employees (by setting uniform minimum or maximum prices and hours of work) and prevent competition between members within the city. In addition, guilds monopolised control over the number of entrants who could enter into the trade, profession or industry; their training (as apprentices); and their accreditation as journeymen.25
Third, because the powerful artisan and merchant guilds were based in towns and supported by town governments, the guilds gave towns (and themselves) a degree of economic power and political independence that helped prevent the town from being attacked or threatened by the nobility (landlords) or the monarch.26 One of the consequences was that towns ceased being extensions of, or supports for, the countryside and increasingly became a competitor with the countryside. Economically, for example, urban-scale manufacturing, trade and finance industries could produce more, cheaper and better-quality goods and services than was possible by the rural handicraft and domestic-scale industries that existed in the rural regions.
Fourth, guilds had the capacity to influence city governments in ways that individual members could not — not just to defend guild members from the imposition of high municipal taxes by the city-state, but to also influence urban planning, the provision of urban infrastructure and any city regulations that could affect the conduct of markets and trade.
Fifth, membership of guilds helped develop inter-city or inter-regional trade. Membership of a local guild gave to its members a degree of legitimacy and commercial security that assisted them when they were developing agreements with traders and merchants from other cities or countries who were effectively strangers.
Finally, guilds made it possible for members to act as a cartel, setting fixed prices, ensuring no member could undercut the price of other members with the result that customers in the city had little choice but to pay the monopolistic prices set by the guild.
Marx notes that the creation of corporate property also helped develop what in capitalism would become the capitalist class. Guilds assisted those who were the owners of tools, machinery, buildings and raw materials (and other forces of production) to unify and work together to protect their common economic, commercial and industrial interests. These wealthier town citizens recognised they had common political interests and defended themselves against political pressures from the municipal council, estate-based landowners and the monarch.
In addition, through their inter-city and inter-regional trade and communications, the burghers of separate towns worked together to defend their common economic interests across cities. Guild members also worked together within and across cities to develop common wage and work conditions and other agreed industrial relations practices to reduce competition among themselves and to have a common front in the control of their workforces.
The burghers, working together within and between separate towns and cities, acted as a proto-class to change societal-wide conditions to benefit their economic and political interests. As they organised and acted collectively, they slowly developed into a new bourgeois class in the face of two simultaneous pressures: one external (‘The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors’) and the other internal (‘the class in its turn achieves an independent existence over against the individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of existence predestined, and hence have their position in life and their personal development assigned to them by their class, become subsumed under it’).2
