CAPÍTULO II 2 MARCO TEÓRICO
2.2.8 ¿A QUÉ EDAD EMPIEZA EL JUEGO SIMBÓLICO?
The Enclosures: Upending social-environmental relations
In England, feudal social relations that had generally prevailed for some centuries were recast in 1235 when the Statute of Merton166 gave effect to the
enclosing of common lands. Mediated by the establishment of title deeds, the stage was set for monarchs, bishops and lords to sweep aside the notional rights of the peasantry to its former way of life. In its playing out, un-fenced holdings upon which peasants had subsisted, grazed cattle and run pigs and poultry, transformed into one where the reach of an emerging landed class would be extended through mass appropriations, more commonly, the enclosures.
On the face of it, the impetus was to concentrate the productivity of pastureland for sheep grazing in order to meet increasing demand for wool in Europe167. Yet more broadly, the motive force of profit, along with money as a
medium of exchange, began to find effect. Despite the fact that the process appears glacially slow by contemporary standards, the period from the 13th
to the 15th centuries constituted a critical moment in the transition to a new
mode of production. Indeed, it was one in which the force of change would be unleashed with such uncontained reach that it would extend well beyond the territories in which it began.
The forces at work in this overarching transformation are located in the social milieu of the early enclosures. Characteristically, this was a period where produce and services constituted the predominant means by which the peasantry met the rent burden of their tenancies. In the case of England and much of Europe, the landowning class did little, and in most cases nothing, to improve the productivity of their lands. Indeed, their various holdings had been established to ensure maximum gain for minimal investment.
166 McIntosh, op.cit., p. 92 167 ibid, p.92
With the number of tenants large enough to supply requisite rents, in kind as services and produce, the much-stratified peasantry had been the only consistent force in agrarian improvements, especially during the period from 11th
to 13th
centuries168
. As Katz notes:
The heavy plough and the improved harnessing techniques necessary to draw it; the larger fields appropriate to the new ploughing techniques; the two-and three-field system of crop rotation; cropping changes such as the substitution of wheat for rye as the primary winter crop – these striking innovations in medieval agricultural technology and land management were pioneered by the peasantry.169
The oppressive nature of these social relations notwithstanding, the peasantry of medieval England held an enduring relationship to the land. In addition, the means of production – the land itself - whilst not directly owned by the peasantry, was no less generally and immediately available as both home and workplace. Here, the productivity of land was attributable to feudal social relations, particularly because nascent capitalism was not yet in a position to displace those relations. By contrast, what followed during the period from the mid fifteenth to thelate seventeenth centuries170 constituted an irreversible
transformational process, one driven by increasing commodity production, coupled with the advent of money as a medium of exchange, along with expanding markets, controlled trade routes and a bourgeoning industrial sector. All these cemented the ownership and control of land as a cornerstone of ‘progress’ and ‘improvements’.
Social and economic imperatives that upended and subsequently reformed feudal agriculture were coupled with grazing and wool production as the effective means by which rapid capital accumulation – precursor of the new mode of production - would find effect. Indeed, so intense was the drive to convert agricultural land into pasture that by 1700, 75% of land had been acquired through some 4,000 Private Acts of Enclosure. By 1845 the General Act of Enclosure had all but completed a mass transfer of land holdings from the ‘common people’ to a landowning class. By 1876, so devastatingly
168 Davidson, op.cit., 231
169 Katz, C. (1993) “Karl Marx On The Transition From Feudalism To Capitalism”, Theory And
Society, 22, p.370
170 Davidson, N., (2004) ‘The Scottish Path to Capitalist Agriculture 1: From the Crisis of
Feudalism to the Origins of Agrarian Transformation (1688-1746)’, Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 4, No.3, July, p. 231
effective was the process that a mere 0.6% of the total population of England owned 98.5% of all land171.
In a comprehensive account of the period Davidson’s observations develop considerable detail about the nature of these transformative shifts:
In response to these developments the feudal system began to display two new characteristics, both of which however left the central exploitative process unchanged. One was the form in which surplus was appropriated. The general commutation of servile dues and the attendant shifts from labour rent through rent in kind to money rent refined the system without bringing about the domination of capitalist relations of production – the existence of money being a necessary but insufficient condition for this to take place. The other was in the nature of the state. By the middle of the fifteenth century absolutism [that political system that invests absolute power in a monarch] had begun to replace the estates monarchies of military feudalism as the typical state form across most of Europe.172
[Insertion added]
Unsettling Relations of Power : Church and State
Just as monarchs, peers and parliaments mediated in the institutionalised servitude of the common people, so religion regulated the broader array of values that ordered social life for all classes. Throughout medieval England and Europe the reach and legitimacy of the Roman Catholic Church had been secured by fusing its role as agent of the sacred to the social order of day-to- day life. Pervasive in its presence the church stood beside, rather than beneath the regents, enjoying favour in the form of wealth, property and shared dominion over the broader population from which it extracted its own bounty in tithes, indulgences and services.
Historically, the relationship between church and monarch had been forged in a spirit of mutual benefit. Patronage on the part of the regents was exchanged for the legitimising imprimatur of the church. Each of these institutions enjoyed dominion over the vast majority of the population and, occasional plotting aside, both ruled territories that were clearly delineated: in the case of the monarch, the material world; for the church, the invisible, yet still powerful domain of the sacred173
.
171 ibid., p.92
172 Davidson, N., (2004) ‘The Scottish Path to Capitalist Agriculture 2: The Capitalist Offensive
(1747-1815)’, Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 4, No.4, October, p. 232
173 Bell, M. (2004) An Invitation to Environmental Sociology (2nd ed.), Sage, London, pp.129-132
This arrangement had effectively and consistently ordered the social life of early medieval England and Europe until a critical disruption, which came with the accession of the Tudors to the English throne. Here, despite its sanctified and legitimate place, the Roman Catholic Church found itself unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with its most non-compliant regent, Henry VIII. Henry’s contest with Catholicism was less invested with a challenge to the sanctity of the Church and its doctrines than it was imbued with naked self-interest. Lamenting a marriage from which he sought escape, Henry was faced with a central canon of Catholic dogma – namely, its prohibition on divorce. Determined to rid himself of his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, Henry chose an innovative course: to distort Catholic law. Accordingly, he invoked the Act of Supremacy, which made him head of the Church in England. Subsequently, in 1533, he annulled his marriage to Catherine and married Ann Boleyn. In upending this particular spiritual canon, Henry’s incipient reforms began a process that would erode the traction of Catholicism in England.
While the Catholic Church had lost some purchase in its melee with Henry, it was no less resolved to cling to it as dissent and disaffection spread throughout Europe and England. The prospect of a religious reformation that would diminish its place and power, combined with the challenge of an enlightened science to its doctrinaire grip, propelled the Catholic Church into a vigorous response. In 1542 an ecclesiastical tribunal, more usually the European Inquisition, was established. Here dissenters of every hue, along with those suspected of assorted offences against God could be tried, tortured and put to death in the face of various ‘blasphemies’174.
The Inquisition was to endure for some three centuries, yet the intervening power plays between monarchy and church were to culminate in a broadly pitched onslaught against the church’s corruption, institutionalised violence and surreptitious plots. Confronted by the Reformation of the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church would not cede its power and authority without a pitched battle, and while the project of reforming Catholicism in England initially failed, it simultaneously opened a door that was to see its power base
obliterated. What had begun with her father’s more personal whim, Elizabeth I elaborated on a grander scale; instead of reforming the Roman Catholic Church in England, Elizabeth established the new Church of England. It was 1559, only two decades after Henry’s first attempt to contain the reach of the Catholic Church and adapt it to his own immediate and more personal needs. In effect, the dispatch of Catholicism was far better orchestrated by Elizabeth, but there remained one final hurdle to its demise which was to come some fifty years after her death175
.
James II, a committed Catholic, ascended the throne of England in 1685 amidst divided views and significant tensions. Absolutist and militaristic, James antagonised sections of both the Anglican Church and the English Parliament. Within three years, the many and varied onslaughts that James wrought on both parliament and the judiciary culminated in his overthrow in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Led by William of Orange, his daughter Mary’s husband, Protestantism was again reaffirmed in England. With it came an end to absolutism along with the consolidation of parliament’s power, both necessary precursors to the rise of the state and the development of capitalism. Indeed, by the time the Glorious Revolution had run its short course, England had virtually completed the transition from feudalism to capitalism176. With the dispatch of James II, constraints on economic
development were lifted as the private ownership of land and the development of new markets finally upended feudal agrarian production. Clearly, the social and religious dimensions of post-Reformation England helped consolidate a new relationship between church and state. In particular, the fusion of moral-ethical values to economic imperatives underscored the agrarian reforms and industrial revolution that was to follow. Christianity had generally played its part in the subjugation of nature, yet its doctrinal differences were far more significant to the actual consolidation of capitalism in both Scotland and England. Whereas Catholicism had elevated the agency of the sacred as a universal force that could open the gates of heaven to all,
175 Bell, M. (2004), An Invitation to Environmental Sociology (2nd ed.), Sage, London, pp.129-132
and Davidson, N., Davidson, N., (2004) ‘The Scottish Path to Capitalist Agriculture 2: The Capitalist Offensive (1747-1815)’, Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 4, No.4, October, pp.227-264
176 Davidson, N., (2004) ‘The Scottish Path to Capitalist Agriculture 2: The Capitalist Offensive
Protestantism asserted predestination as a precursor to admission. That is, in its Calvinist form, Protestantism specified that only the “elect” would find a place in heaven. Importantly, the best indicator of one’s likely admission to heaven was the degree to which one registered moral uprightness through hard work and asceticism. Unlike the Catholic doctrine of forgiveness and redemption, where salvation could be bought through indulgences, Protestantism inculcated a moral anxiety in its adherents, one that could only be assuaged by hope and toil. The general effect of this doctrine led directly to the elevation of work, to the degree that labour processes became increasingly efficient, rational and geared for market-based economies. Whereas Catholicism had traded on a patronage that supported its attendant internal hierarchies, Protestantism’s moral compass showed the way toward personal responsibility through work and capital accumulation. In effect, Protestantism occupied the world and moulded it through direct economic engagement; Catholicism, by contrast, accumulated wealth through marketing ‘divine’ imperatives which were articulated by the ordained, human face of God177.
At the most general level religion played a pivotal role throughout the long feudal epoch, yet it was the more specific variant of Protestantism that contributed much to its final dispatch. In its relation to capitalism, Protestantism developed a doctrine that dislodged old relations of production and fed significant shifts in the ways that human beings structured their relations with environments. The legacy of its influence on the capitalist enterprise is significant. Writing of the period, Bell notes:
…modern capitalism is spreading well beyond …dominantly Protestant and Christian countries…Religion is no longer the driving force. The capitalist spirit steadily enfolds country after country into its secularized ethic of ascetic rationalism. Economic structures have taken over from Martin Luther and John Calvin in spreading this spirit, even as this spirit dialogically propels the structures, as in the way hard work speeds the treadmill faster and faster178.
177 Bell, M.M. (2004) An Invitation to Environmental Sociology (2nd ed.), Sage, London pp.129-131 178 ibid., p. 131
Recalibrating Relations: State, Science, Land and Markets
In turning to the significant impacts that came with this final resolution between church and state, transformations in the physical-natural environment became far more critical than they had hitherto been. Whereas agricultural production that had developed gradually over a period of several centuries had been ‘associated with the enclosures and the growing centrality of market relations …(along with) technical changes and livestock management’179
, the period between the 17th
and 18th
centuries saw a full blown revolution that played itself out over a far shorter time frame. In alignment with the circulation of money as a medium of exchange and the imperative of capital accumulation, the intensification of agricultural production during the period between 1830 and 1880 saw a mass reworking of the land. Such was the scale of this trend that the depletion of soil fertility led directly to an immediate solution - the extensive and ongoing importation of fertilizers. As Foster notes:
In the 1820’s and 1830’s in Britain, and shortly afterwards in other developing capitalist economies of Europe and North America, widespread concerns about “soil exhaustion” led to a phenomenal increase in the demand for fertilizer. The value of bone imports to Britain increased from £14,400 in 1823 to £254,600 in 1837. The first boat carrying Peruvian guano (the accumulated dung of sea birds) unloaded its cargo in Liverpool in 1835; by 1841, 1,700 tons were imported, and by 1847, 220,000.180
With pressure mounting to increase crop yields, the application of organic chemistry was brought to bear. Led by Justus von Liebig, the role of soil nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) in relation to the growth of plants led to a reworking of agriculture itself. Importantly, this new knowledge prefigured the production of phosphates on an industrial scale. Led largely by Liebig’s work, ‘J.B. Lawes, a wealthy English landowner and agronomist, invented a means of making phosphate soluble, enabling him to introduce the first artificial fertiliser, and in 1843, he built a factory for the production of his new “superphosphates”’181.
These advances occurred none to soon; by the 1860’s, supplies of Peruvian guano – a primary source of phosphates - had been exhausted. Lawes’
179 Foster, J.B. (1999) ‘Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations of
Environmental Sociology’, American Journal of Sociology, 105, No. 2, pp. 373-4
180 Ibid., pp. 375-376 181 ibid., p.376
entrepreneurialism appeared to have solved part of the problem, but the same could not be said for the acquisition of sufficient supplies of nitrogen fertilizer. In fact, it was not until 1913 that synthetic nitrogen fertilizer would be produced182
.
Stepping back from the more empirical detail of these developments in agriculture, Foster isolates some of the more general and enduring forces that arose during the period:
The second agricultural revolution [from 1830-1880], associated with the application of scientific chemistry to agriculture, was…a period of intense contradictions. The decline in the natural fertility of the soil due to the disruption of the soil nutrient cycle, the expanding scientific knowledge of the need for specific soil nutrients, and the simultaneous limitations in the supply of both natural and synthetic fertilisers, all served to generate serious and future concerns about future soil fertility under capitalist agriculture183.
In an extensive commentary delivered in 1859, Liebig calls into question the overarching material and social conditions that lead not only to “exhaustion of the soil”, but just as importantly, the impoverishment of populations generally184. In effect, the nineteenth century was one in which both social
and environmental degradation became a motif of capitalist development. Yet the spread and dispersal of capitalist relations was neither even nor uniform. Combined and Uneven Development: Installing Relations of Power
Many contemporary narratives regarding the transition from feudalism to capitalism tend toward generalities, yet the more specific territorial variants that unfolded during the late medieval period set the scene for disparate development, both within England and Europe, and beyond, in the new world. In and of themselves, these disparities are not necessarily significant. Indeed, they tend to dissipate in circumstances where various national transitions to a capitalist mode of production were synchronised. What is significant is the fact that in some cases, the transformation from a feudal to a capitalist mode of production occurred much later than it did within the more advanced territories. The net effect of this temporal disjuncture was the opening up of extensive opportunities for established capitalist states to steer
182 ibid., pp. 377- 8 183 ibid., p.377 184 ibid., p.378
the fortunes of their less advanced neighbours, to the degree that new and complimentary relations were brokered in an environment of compromise and control.
In addition to the power exerted by the more developed territories over the less, the character and membership of landowning classes per se became a critical feature of the cultural hue of early capitalism. Even where one country exerted force over another through internal colonisation and exploitation of the commons, the dominant country’s capitalist class more usually provided broad support for their less developed cohorts. Critically, and in many cases, this process facilitated the transmission of relations, values and ‘membership’ from the colonising into newly colonised nations and their pre-existing class systems.
Much is rightly made of both the necessary and sufficient conditions to