Extra-Economic Coercion

Also known as “non-economic coercion”. It refers to the fact that the landlord class in feudal society exploited the peasants’ personal dependence on them and thus gained dominance over the serfs, and by means of this extra-economic supervision and compulsory means, extort surplus-labor from the direct producers.

In feudal society, although peasants used their own instruments of production to cultivate small plots of land, they were bound to the soil or the feudal system, unable to leave their manor or homestead and lost their personal freedom to varying degrees. The landowner or lord could summon, beat, and punish the peasants at will, and in some cases they could sell, mortgage or use them for gambling, transfer, etc. These were the extra-economic coercive forces that the feudal landlord class possessed over the peasants.

Extra-economic coercion was put forth by Marx. Marx held that the feudal epoch was an epoch of universal dependence. The then property relations, with the political and social accessories attached to them, did not assume a purely economic form. Marx pointed out that “the surplus-labor for the nominal owner of the land can only be extorted from them by other than economic pressure, whatever the form assumed may be… Thus, conditions of personal dependence are requisite, a lack of personal freedom, no matter to what extent, and being tied to the soil as its accessory, bondage in the true sense of the word.”

Extra-economic coercion and economic coercion are both means and modes by which the exploiting class extorts the surplus-labor from the exploited class. But they vary. Economic coercion is the use of purely economic means by exploiting classes to achieve their domination and exploitation of the laborers. In the feudal system, although economic coercion also exists, it is not economic coercion but extra-economic coercion that characterizes it. This is determined by the feudal system itself. Whether under serfdom or tenancy, the serf or peasant had his own small private ownership economy, i.e., an independent economy that one can live off without one’s serf-owner or landowner, producing on one’s own plot or rented small-holding with one’s own tools. Under such conditions, if there was no extra-economic coercion, they would not work on the land of the serf-owner or pay rent in kind to the landlord.

Although extra-economic coercion played a certain role in consolidating, maintaining and strengthening the feudal relations of exploitation, it cannot be exaggerated as the basis of the relations of exploitation of the feudal system. It was never extra-economic coercion, but rather feudal property in land, that was the basis of the feudal relations of production.