Feudal Society

An independent social formation based on the exploitation of one individual by another in which the feudal mode of production is dominant. It was born within the slave society and gave birth to the capitalist society.

In The German Ideology (1845–1846), taking medieval Western European society as their object of investigation, Marx and Engels divided the history of society prior to capitalism into three forms of property, i.e., tribal property, ancient commune property and state property in classical antiquity and feudal or estate property. Later, in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), they made a new generalization: “In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society.”

In the historical evolution of the economic formations of human society, the feudal mode of production has appeared in almost all countries and nations. Its existence is generally believed to have started around the 5th century AD and ended in the mid-17th century AD. Due to the uneven development of human history, the feudal society in many countries lasted longer than this. The feudal society in China began around the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 BC) and the Warring States period (475–221 BC), and ended in the early 20th century.

The path of the emergence of the feudal society the world and the paths they followed varied greatly from country to country. In places such as China, India, the Middle and Near East and Western Europe, there was a transition from slave society to feudal society; in places such as Eastern and Western Slavia, Scandinavia, England, there was a direct entry from the primitive society to the feudal society; and there were some nations such as the Arabs and the Germans who jumped directly from primitive to feudal society by conquering advanced regions under the influence of their example. In the late slave society, the contradiction between the germs of the feudal economy and the already decadent superstructure grew increasingly intense, arousing fierce class struggles and paving the way for the birth of the feudal society.

The economic foundation of the feudal society was feudal property in land. The feudal lord’s monopoly over most of the land and his incomplete appropriation of the direct producers is the essence of the feudal property in land. The feudal lord appropriated the surplus-labor of the peasants or serfs through the form of contracts, with the help of extra-economic coercion and the rigid hierarchical relations of personal dependence. Rent in kind has been the most fundamental form of exploitation throughout the whole process of development of feudal society, and there was also a lot of labor-rent, and in the later period, until in the later period money-rent gradually came to dominate.

The scale of production of feudal agriculture was small-scale production, which was basically carried out by individual peasant households. Although these agricultural workers were independent economies, they were personally dependent on the feudal lord. The feudal economy of all countries was mainly a natural economy, but there were also petty craftsmen, petty commercial capital and merchants who had certain means of production and independently carried out commodity production, as well as cities as that served as industrial and commercial centers. In feudal society, with the continuous development of money-rent and its contractual relations, the prosperity of commerce and urban manufacture, the weakening of the policy of emphasizing agriculture and restraining commerce, the role of industry and commerce has gradually increased; it has promoted the exchange between town and country, drawn more and more economic sectors into the sphere of circulation, and continuously promoted the disintegration of the natural economy and the feudal economy was faced with demise.

The fundamentally opposing classes in the feudal society were peasants and feudal lords. There were also working people such as craftsmen and the urban poor, as well as various intermediate strata. The class of feudal lords was mostly a group of aristocrats who inherited their titles from generation to generation and enjoyed various privileges. They formed a unit with each other through paternal clan (China, “宗族”, zongzu), vassal system (Western Europe), and housemen system (Japan, “Gokenin”), etc., to suppress working people such as peasants, craftsmen and the urban poor. Although the economic state and the legal identity of the feudal peasantry were different, they were consistent in terms of being oppressed by feudal exploitation. Unable to bear the oppression of feudal exploitation, the peasants rose up in rebellion and waged various forms of struggle reaching its highest form in large-scale peasant uprisings and peasant wars.

Feudal regimes were, by and large, monarchies that implemented centralism, and the state functions were carried out by the bureaucratic apparatus and the army. But its degree and scale had varied by time and place. Feudal law was the embodiment of the will of the class of feudal lords and a special tool for suppressing the working people. Serfs were excluded from the protection of the law, and there was no equality in the application of the law to people of different estates.

The dominant ideology of feudal society chiefly manifested itself as various religious forms. The most important religions, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. Other ideologies were often subject to the provisions of religious doctrines. In China and some East Asian countries, the dominant ideology was Confucianism rather than any religion, and the chief content of propaganda was the political and ethical dogmas for maintaining feudal dominance.

In the late period of feudal society, with the development of productive forces and on the basis of developed commodity production, the germs of capitalism— capitalist manufactories—gradually emerged within the feudal society, and with it the bourgeoisie also appeared in Western Europe. The rising bourgeoisie launched great movements such as the Renaissance and Reformation, and won the support of the peasants and craftsmen in the name of representing the general interests of the people, and in order to overthrow the feudal rule and make the transition to capitalism, it waged a struggle against the class of feudal lords. The English bourgeois revolution, which broke out in the mid-17th century, marked the beginning of the capitalist era on a world-wide scale. Feudal societies in other countries of the world, especially in Asia and Africa, did not disappear until the 19th century.