Feudalism

The feudal social system is a social system based on the property in the basic means of production by feudal landlords and the exploitation of the surplus-labor of peasants (or serfs). In China, generally speaking, feudalism has lasted for more than 2,000 years since the turn of the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. In Europe, feudalism experienced a history of more than 1,300 years from the 5th to 18th centuries A.D..

Marx’s thoughts on feudalism have been running through his social and historical thoughts, including his thoughts on Oriental society. Within the framework of the doctrine of social formations of the materialist conception of history, Marx and Engels defined feudalism, put forth propositions such as feudal mode of production and feudal property, and studied the economic structure and the causes of economic and social changes in the entire feudal society.

Marx made a detailed elaboration on the process of emergence of feudalism. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels studied the German feudal state formed by conquest: “The destruction of an old civilization by a barbarous people and the resulting formation of an entirely new organization of society. (Rome and the barbarians; feudalism and Gaul; the Byzantine Empire and the Turks)”, “this fact of taking is made to explain the transition from the old world to the feudal system. In this taking by barbarians, however, the question is whether the nation, which is conquered has evolved industrial productive forces, as is the case with modern peoples, or whether its productive forces are based for the most part merely on their concentration and on the community… The form of community adopted by the settling conquerors must correspond to the stage of development of the productive forces they find in existence… The conquerors very soon took over language, culture and manners from the conquered. The feudal system was by no means brought complete from Germany, but had its origin, as far as the conquerors were concerned, in the martial organization of the army during the actual conquest, and this evolved only after the conquest into the feudal system proper through the action of the productive forces found in the conquered countries.” This feudalization, formed primarily by conquest, was further explored by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, showing that the feudal system was not brought about by the conquerors themselves, but came into being on the basis of the productive forces already attained by the conquered.

According to Marxism, the essence of feudalism originates from the mode of production, and the formation of a mode of production is influenced by the contradiction between economic foundation and superstructure. Feudalism was bred and grew up within the slave society, and was usually established by the feudal landlord class with the help of slave uprisings to overthrow the rule of the class of slave-owners under the conditions of the dissolution of slavery and the emergence of feudal relations of production. At the end of the slave society, due to the lack of workers, the large estates and handicraft workshops using slaves could not be maintained, and there appeared small-scale farming and handicraft workshops privately run by craftsmen. Some of the large estate owners rented out their land and let tenant farmers engage in small-scale operations, collecting a certain amount of the products of labor from them. As a result, the slave-owners turned into landowners of large estates and slaves turned into peasants in servitude, which was the germ of feudalism bred from within slavery. Marx pointed out that the small-scale peasant economy and the independent handicraftsman’s operation were, to some extent, the basis of the feudal mode of production. “The fate of the ‘democratic’ Lechitic community was inevitable. The dominium proper is usurped by the crown, the aristocracy, etc.; the patriarchal relations between the dominium and the peasant communities lead to serfdom... This kind of development is interesting because here serfdom can be shown to have arisen in a purely economic way, without the intermediate link of conquest and racial dualism...” A component part of the feudal property in the means of production was the dependence of serfs, as direct producers, on the lords. Capital writes: “The direct producer is not free; a lack of freedom which may be reduced from serfdom with enforced labor to a mere tributary relationship… 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.” In view of the feudal system in Europe, Marx wrote: “We find everyone dependent, serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clergy. Personal dependence here characterizes the social relations of production just as much as it does the other spheres of life organized on the basis of that production.” The chief forms of feudal property were private property in land and serf labor bound to it. On this basis, the rising landlord class, consisting of wealthy commoners, craftsmen and merchants, rose up and distributed land to the coloni for tilling, in this way, the coloni were bound to the land, consequently the feudal property in land was established, and the feudal social system began. With the further development of productive forces, feudal relations of production and its superstructure gradually became an obstacle to the development of productive forces and was eventually replaced by new capitalism.

In the feudal social system, the landlord class and the peasantry are the two fundamental classes in opposition to each other. Compared with slavery, the feudal relations of production enabled the peasants to have certain personal freedom and their own private ownership economy. The peasants had the right to control part of the products of their personal labor, so that they could mobilize the peasants’ enthusiasm for production to a certain extent and develop their productive forces. Under the feudal social system, iron tools were widely used and agriculture and cattle-raising developed greatly. But the peasants, bound by the feudal social system, had no political rights and other human rights. The feudal system fully represents the interests of the feudal lords, i.e., the maintenance of their property in land.

Ideologically, feudalism implemented rule by force from within, and made use of religion and theology for its ideological supremacy. In China, combining the patriarchal system with the political power within the ruling class, feudal ideology was an ideological system based on and serving feudal economic relations and political system, the basic content of which was the morality and ethics of the idea of hierarchy and the thought of privileges. Since the founding of New China, the economic foundation and political system of feudalism has been smashed, but the remnant thoughts of feudalism still exist.