Despite the absence of any conception of feudalism, Marx tells the story of the rise of European civil society beginning with the political secession of towns from the jurisdiction of lords ensconced in armed castles. Within these merchant-artisan towns, the emergence of an opposition of mental to manual labor within the guild system set the mold for a subsequent division between masters and journeymen. The unleashing of conflict between free towns and the lord-ruled countryside led to the erosion of serfdom as peasants fled into towns, swelling the ranks of a proto-proletariat. With the invention of bills of exchange and other sophisticated credit instruments, a new intra-regional division of labor emerged between town and country, stimulated by the introduction of luxury goods from Asia. The fortunes formed from long-distance trade subjugated and partly destroyed the guild system, creating the conditions for the first development of large-scale manufactures, which invaded the country to employ the poor and landless. The promotion of manufacturing sectors by early modern states seeking to amass account surpluses led to mercantilist wars and colonial conquests.
“Competition soon compelled every country that wished to retain its historical role to protect its manufactures by renewed customs regulations (the old duties were no longer any good against large-scale industry) and soon after to introduce large-scale industry under protective duties. In spite of these protective measures large-scale industry universalized competition (it is practical free trade; the protective duty is only a palliative, a measure of defense within free trade), established means of communication and the modern world market, subordinated trade to itself, transformed all capital into industrial capital, and thus produced the rapid circulation (development of the financial system) and the centralization of capital.”
As a pioneer of the factory system, England prevailed in these mercantilist wars leading to the formation of a world market centered on its industrial supremacy. The new system of free trade gave England a near monopoly in the most advanced branches of production undercutting the socio-economic foundations of Europe’s old regimes even without giving rise there to a comparable dynamic of development. As indicated earlier, in expectation of an imminent revolution, Marx and Engels did not expect the factory system to make deep inroads on the continent.
The political economy of the early Marx was of a piece with a certain conception of the origins of modern bourgeois society. The latter assumed its existing form by subjecting the countryside to urban commercial centers which had expanded out from the interstices of the guild system.
“The most important division of material and mental labor is the separation of town and country. The contradiction between town and country begins with the transition from barbarism to civilization, from tribe to state, from locality to nation, and runs through the whole history of civilization to the present day (the Anti-Corn Law League).”
The socio-economic mechanism by which commerce spontaneously expanded into the countryside, undermining traditional modes of peasant subsistence and thereby engendering a new town/country division of labor, is not specified in Marx’s original sketch of the materialist conception of history. Not only do the distinct stages of this historical sequence not seem to possess their own qualitatively distinct socio-economic dynamics, this account also failed to identify any cause for the trans-historical tendency of the productive forces to advance, a process which it seems simply to presuppose. Commerce, war, and population growth indeterminately mingle as manifestations of a cumulative growth of the productive forces that culminates in the emergence of modern bourgeois society. The lack of a coherent explanation for this progressive course of history is arguably symptomatic of its intellectual dependence on what it rejected: an idealism for which history is the epic of man’s ascent from natural bondage to social freedom.
Marx’s distinct early and later conceptions of the nature of capital implied fundamentally different accounts of its primitive accumulation. As we shall see, it was only in the aftermath of the defeat of the revolutions of 1848 that Marx began to distinguish between the genesis of capitalist social relations out of feudalism in England and the parallel mercantilization of the feudal order induced by the formation of a centralizing monarchy collecting taxes in money. Referring to Augustin Thierry, “le père of the ‘class struggle’ in French historiography,” he noted
“Although he does not generalize, he depicts very nicely, 1. how from the beginning, or at least since the rise of the towns, the French bourgeoisie has gained undue influence by constituting itself a parliament, bureaucracy, etc., and not, as in England, by commerce and industry alone.”
Even before, in his polemic against Proudhon, Marx let drop an observation the implications of which he did not explore until after the early period considered here.
“England, with the concentration of the land, this instrument of agricultural labor, has at the same time division of agricultural labor and the application of machinery to the exploitation of the soil. France, which has the division of the instruments, the small holdings system, has, in general, neither division of agricultural labor nor application of machinery to the soil.”
Before considering the further political elaborations of historical materialism up to the revolutions and counter-revolutions of 1848-52, let us recall the contours of the political scenario in which this history of modern civil society would culminate. The separation of state and civil society led to a social polarization that transformed the European state into a sphere of the naked representation of class struggles. This representative relationship of modern civil society to the state stemmed from the separation of these two spheres grounded in the social relation of ‘alienated labor’-in the sense of generalized exchange dependency- a condition that resulted in the division of the income of society into the forms of rent, profit and wages. World history on its European central stage would be passing through breaking points in which the social forms of rent, profit and the wage would be abolished in succession.
The bourgeois revolution of the first half of the 19th century aimed to abolish, not feudalism per se, but rather post-feudal old regimes which introduced modernizing reforms to preserve the privileges of courts, state churches and landed proprietors. In the earliest phases of this great transformation, land rent would lose its traditional privileged form and become an ordinary interest-bearing financial asset, amidst a general liberation of commerce and industry. The resulting boost to socio-economic development would put wind in the sails of a liberal opposition of businessmen and professionals who would come to demand parliamentary control of budget and exclusive power of legislation. These political changes would open the door to a more complete subsumption of society into the mold of the capital-wage labor relation with all the ensuing consequences. “Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses…this distinctive feature: it has simplified class antagonisms.”
From its beginnings, the rise of the bourgeoisie unfolded as a battle on two fronts- forcing through the separation of the state from civil society against the privileged strata and stifling regulations of the old regime, while suppressing the self-organization of the growing number of those who lived by wages. Even before the final political victory of the liberal opposition, the proletariat was compelled to organize itself as a political class out of the depths of atomization and pauperism.
The primary objective of the workers movement was thus the suppression of the competition between isolated workers which kept them dependent upon wages, living hand to mouth and in constant danger of unemployment. The formation of trade unions was but the first step in the process of the abolition of the wage system itself as the foundation of bourgeois property- the return on capital. This process of self-emancipation began with the struggle against wage reduction for the employed, passed over into the political sphere with the demand for the abolition of the distinction between employed and unemployed- “the right to work” and the “organization of labor”- and, after fearsome class struggles, culminated in the abolition of alienated labor, and with it, the division of labor itself. The capital-wage labor relation was predicated on a bedrock of unemployment, a permanent excess of the demand for labor over the supply of it. The seemingly modest demand that employment be a right thus struck at the foundation of bourgeois society.
“The right to work is, in the bourgeois sense, an absurdity, a miserable, pious wish. But behind the right to work stands the power over capital; behind the power over capital, the appropriation of the means of production, their subjection to the associated working class, and therefore the abolition of wage labor, of capital, and of their mutual relations.”
Through its self-organization, proletariat would pass from being an ally of the bourgeoisie to its mortal enemy. During this transition, the form of the state would undergo the following transformations: from being an external coercive order standing above society (the unreformed old regime), it would become the sphere of an imaginary social self-determination (constitutional monarchy and stabilized bourgeois republics) before being reduced to a mere arena in which the class struggle plays out to the end (the civil war republic as transition to communism or regression to barbarism.)