Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
No Royal Road: Getting Medieval With Rodney Hilton, Part 1
While the introduction music is that of Varn Vlog on this podcaster, this series will be simultaneously released on both the Varn Vlog podcast feed and the Regrettable Century podcast feed. This is a long-running series we are doing on understanding social technologies, relationships of production, and how we get here: i.e. what is the social and class history of the past.
In this episode, begin discussing sections of "Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Essays in Medieval Social History" by Rodney Hilton.Wondering why British Marxists are often overlooked? Or perhaps you're curious about the fiery debates over the existence of feudalism that once captivated French and British historians? Step aboard as we embark on a fascinating journey through the world of Rodney Hilton, a significant figure in the British Marxist tradition.
Fasten your seatbelts, it's time to dive headfirst into the complex world of feudalism and minoralism. During our discussion, we'll be using Rodney Hilton's contributions as a guide, comparing the perspectives of the British Academy and the French Academy. From the origins of feudalism to Marx's views on it, we'll leave no stone unturned when it comes to these historically significant systems. We'll also discuss the complexities of class formation, and the tension between feudalism and capitalism.
We'll also offer insight into the revolutionary pessimism versus misanthropy debate, utilizing Neil Davidson's book, "How Revolutionary Were the Bush War Revolutions", as a springboard. Join us as we dissect the concept of revolution, investigating its application in different societies and its significance in shaping social order. Offering a rich and engaging discussion, this is an episode you won't want to miss. It doesn't matter if you're an academic, an enthusiast, or just intrigued by history and politics - there's something here for everyone. Let's embark on this intellectual journey together.
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Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
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Welcome to no World Road where we get medieval with Rodney Hilton. I wasn't going to say we get medieval in the Hilton, but that was too many puns at once. So for those who don't know, I want to start us off with a brief introduction. I'm going to pass it over to Regrettable Chris, who is sort of a the closest thing we have to an approximate expert. We might call him a lay expert on this topic, since you actually have credentials in this field and did study this explicitly.
Chris:For a while, but that was a long time ago.
Varn:Yeah, now you study the other stuff explicitly but it's still in the same field. So the other stuff for you guys who don't know is reactionary Germany, because that's fun. It is fun it is.
Chris:It's just like it's fascinating and mind-blowing the things that these guys come up with, the way they. I mean, I don't know, it's very strange and interesting.
Varn:Do I put the plastic in the blue bin on the yellow bin? Is it the blue bin on the yellow bin? Invade POLAND. This is my theory of why German reactionaries go the way they do.
Chris:That's a good like Panacea, though right there INVADE POLAND or France.
Varn:Everybody invades. France. I mean, in France they invade everybody. The thing with Poland is, Poland doesn't really invade everybody. They're sort of there.
Chris:Well, they invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938. Fair.
Jason:They invaded Ukraine in the 20s and they invaded. Belarus.
Varn:Who amongst us has not invaded Ukraine? That's a good point.
Chris:I mean they invaded Germany as well. Like after the Treaty of Versailles, there's like several little border grabs, Just a little bit more territory. That's where the idea of the bleeding frontiers came from and why the Freikor went to go fight the Poles.
Varn:Yeah, this is the thing with Europe. We just need to abolish it and get it over with.
Jason:Yeah, it's like the whole world has kind of moved past the need for Europe.
Chris:Well, that's sort of what the European Union is right. Just abolish all of the borders and create one amorphous blob of Europeans. Yeah, that's worked out really well.
Jason:That was great.
Varn:Now the point of debate. If you want to watch Coast Streamed on my channel, my discussion on GTA, on modern European relations, where everyone calls me either a neoconservative or a tanky simultaneously, depending on what part of the sentence they listen to, it's a fun time. So let us talk about Rodney Howard Hilton, who I know is RHHRHH. If you look at his books, sometimes his books are published under RH Hilton, sometimes they're published under Rodney Hilton. I don't know why that's the case, actually why someone would change the publication name. But there you go, he's dead. I would say he's very dead, but he's only been dead 20 years, so he's in the scope of our world. He's actually not that dead. He is from the accursed Isles, specifically Lancaster, and he was a member of the Communist Party.
Chris:Yes, he was one of the cohort of British Marxists that included like EP Thompson and Christopher Hill.
Varn:EP Thompson, Christopher Hill.
Jason:There's one famous one. I can't think of Hobbsbomb. Yeah, that's the one.
Varn:Hobbsbomb Stuart Hall. Oh yeah, the people sometimes misconstrued as Western Marxist humans, which I think is kind of funny because most of them were diehard defenses of the Soviet Union until like until like 56, you know, that's usually the point where they get skeptical. You know that ends and you know more power to them, I guess.
Jason:Yeah.
Varn:He was an believe it was. Oh, I'm looking here, he was an Oxford Don. No, he was a senior scholar, that's not a Don, I should be very careful with that. And he was married to Margaret Palmer, of British Communist fame. He left the Communist Party in 1956, like a lot of people did, everybody from Ernst Block to, like most of the British Marxists, I think I think like Alester McIntyre left around that time to you, although he still called himself a Marxist for another 10 years, and he became involved with the New Left. It's so interesting to me. So the French New Left seems theoretically French and super post-Marxist. The American New Left is all over the place. The British New Left is oddly not discussed that much and one of the things I've always been sort of fascinated by it is of the intellectual Marxist movements, of people who were slightly disillusioned with the Soviet Union but never became like anti-communist or whatever. The British Marxists are under read and I think it's because, frankly, they're easy to understand. I'm somewhat serious about that.
Jason:Yeah, it's because it's clear and it's still Marxist, which means there's no wiggle room to make it a New Left. It's an old Left, just at least framed in the same way.
Varn:Right, I mean they're sympathetic to the New Left critique of the Soviet Union post-1956 and post-the-secret speech, right, but they're not trying to reinvent the wheel. As far as verbiage goes, right, I mean, I think the most radical innovators are going to be like Stuart Hall who talks about cultural cult-wishing and stuff. But even that's not huge and it's perfectly understandable.
Jason:We talked about a Marxism without guarantees, and that's very out of the mainstream for a certain part of the Left the main part of the Left.
Varn:It was interesting though, because the British Marxists, I think, are early on that, because eventually, even the Altisarians and the Lukashians basically get there differently. They're completely opposed in different roads, but by the late 1960s they're all talking about the crisis of Marxism and the inability to talk about inevitability anymore, and that's all the Marxist schools.
Chris:And I think the British get there first, interestingly enough.
Varn:I don't have a good thesis as to why they get there first, but I think they do. I mean it's. And yet also, except for like Alessandro McIntyre, who found Catholic Jesus and Aristotle, most of them stay Marxist, which is different than also a lot of the other 68 groups, like a lot of them don't. So I find that interesting too. And also I really like the poverty of philosophy. Where EP Pahlotton beats up an Altisarian, all the Altisarians are like, oh no, ep Thompson, he didn't win. And I'm like, no, he clearly won. I mean, he didn't attack Altisarian directly, but all the British Altisarians look bad. So Anyway, that's not directly relevant to Rodney Hilton, it's just his context. He lived a long-ass time. He's another one of those. I think Alessandro McIntyre stole all their power because somehow that motherfucker stole life.
Chris:Is he really? Yes, I had no idea he was still alive.
Varn:It's funny because I'm like reading stuff from when he was a Marxist in the 50s and 60s and going back and checking how old he was, and I'm like he was already 40-something years old, like in the early 60s.
Chris:Oh, my God.
Varn:He's almost 100 years old, good ol' McIntyre, and his last book I will also plug is the most Marxist-friendly book he's written since 1982. So he writes gushingly about CLR James in his most recent book.
Jason:The fact that he's 94 and still writing books is kind of amazing actually.
Varn:Yeah.
Jason:Especially because they are actually worth reading.
Varn:I mean again, after virtue is a late work for him. We don't really even talk about his early work, but okay. So today though, we are talking about Rodney Hilton. We're just gushing about his contemporaries. Hilton is cool because A he's one of these guys, and most of us here think, from Christopher Caudwell to to Chris Wickman, we should probably try to redeem the British Marxist tradition, which I guess we would call vaguely humanistic. I don't want to call it humanist, because Marxist humanism is a specific thing and they're not that. But this kind of humanistic Marxism, and one that I think is not sexy because I really do, partly because it's so easy to read it's not generative of papers the way French theory is, I mean, that's somewhat sincerely like French theory gives you intellectual apparatus to churn out paper after paper after paper. We're just just readings. You can't really do that with British Marxist work, because most of it's either economic or historical. There's not that much, I think, what Jameson and Raymond, who are the other British Marxist philosophers who are theoretical, I mean Terri.
Varn:Eagleton, but older than that, is it Raymond Williams? Yeah, yeah, that's one, but that's like I mean, but he's really the only person you can do that to is giving you theoretical apparatuses to apply to papers, right?
Chris:Yeah, he's not. I mean the thing about British, the British in general, especially philosophers, british philosophers is they tend to pretty distinctly map out what it is that they're trying to say and not leave a lot of wiggle room so you don't have like the just the fog, like the Foucaultian fog, to a way that allows you to map it on to pretty much anything you would like to talk about. Say, oh well, here's the Foucaultian, take on public restrooms and here's the Foucaultian, take on the brave little toaster.
Varn:I mean. Well, that's the thing, like one of the things you can critique French French theory for, particularly Foucault. And Foucault is not the worst in terms of like using higher Heideggerian apparatuses to be completely any fucking comprehensible without 25 years of study and then realizing all that was a footnote to Heidegger, cough cough, derrida, the. But Foucault gives you a way to talk like. Foucault gives you a way that, like, conservatives used to claim that dialectical materialism, that which was a talk about everything without knowing anything. And I do think I mean this is a problem with Marxist in general, and I say this as a generalist who talks about everything. But like, like, it is a problem that we sometimes we do they're like. Well, through, through the magic of dialectical materialism, I can literally talk about everything in very simple terms which you can understand because it's vague, yep, and the British don't do that, and I think that's interesting and I'm people are surprised and me saying the praises of the British on anything ever, because Anglo brainwrots, one of my favorite insults, but Anglo brainwrote with Marxism, actually ended up being highly productive, that's true. I guess it. It rotted away the, the more romantic German elements or something, so. But we're reading his classic work, class conflict and the crisis of feudalism.
Varn:Essays and medieval social history from 1985. This book is probably hard to get these days. I don't know.
Chris:I got. I got it a long time ago on like a, a books or a Libras or something like a used version of it.
Varn:I don't think there's been a new printing, so find this book how you may. Listeners, we're not going to tell you how you acquire it, but if you want to read along, we're going to be focusing on chapter 18, feudalism. Are there feudality?
Chris:and sing when and sing granary sing when or sing when you were seen Yuri senior like senior, like a senior is like a lord, so senior, senior that that's a Anglo pronunciation.
Jason:Have the test one, mike again.
Chris:Yes.
Jason:Okay, for some reason said it was unplugged and it muted me or whatever.
Varn:So All right. So I'm going to let Chris pronounce anything anytime anything medieval French comes up, and in France and England chapter 19, was there a general crisis of feudalism, and chapter 20, ideology ideology and social order, and maybe England. And for those of you who are new to know role road, I would strongly suggest you don't need to go back and listen to our morose off series, but you should probably go back and listen to our Wicom series.
Varn:Yeah as a precursor for for this discussion, because that series introduces a lot of the things that we talk about here, but it introduces it in early antiquity, well, excuse me, in early medieval Europe are late antiquity what what the more uncivilized upon us called the dark ages, where this deals with the entirety of the medieval sphere and particularly towards the end of it, late medieval stuff, which is which we might call the beginnings of early modernism, the, the Inglings of the Renaissance, depending on how, on who you are.
Chris:So high to late middle ages is what Hilton focuses on. But because he focuses on the transition to capitalism, he deals with early modern as well.
Varn:Right, yeah, so. So this is where Wicom tells you the beginning of this story. This is the end of the story and I think the way we're structuring the series now we're probably going to go back and forth between applying this People doing weird stuff, for feudalism and feudal categories are modes of production and the actual Marxist historiography. So that's where we are in this series. We'll probably be here for quite a while because we're doing three chapters and that will take us along. That will take us kind of a long time.
Chris:Yeah, we did spend what like seven hours on 20 pages, oh well the Wicom that we read was only 20 pages, right, and I think we did. I think we did four or five episodes on that, yeah yeah. The Morozov was similarly of similar length than we did. I don't know.
Varn:Yeah, we four.
Chris:We can talk about things for a very long time, right?
Varn:I mean, with the Wicom we did keep it. You know, particularly you, chris, kept on interjecting stuff from the books and I kept on interjecting stuff from other Wicom pieces, but it's, we didn't just stick to the text there, but but yeah, it took us a while. So this guy's this might be a couple of years, I don't know. So we'll find out.
Varn:But anyway, first semantic controversy and medieval studies is does feudalism exist or is it minoralism, or are that or is that just a semantic wiggly washy debate? That doesn't mean anything. And within the first line of chapter 18, hilton pretty much indicates by using them simultaneously, that it's a wiggly, wobbly line and shut up. We're not going to argue about that.
Chris:Yeah, I mean, that's like one of the in grad, medieval history, grad school, the 101. So, like the first thing you do is learn about the arguments about whether or not feudalism actually existed, there are actually a lot of medieval historians that say feudalism didn't exist.
Varn:Right.
Chris:Yeah.
Varn:I know friends of the show who are very much in the school. In fact. I know friends of the show who've taken the arguments around feudalism not existing and argue that economic periods don't exist.
Chris:Oh, interesting.
Jason:So that's a considerably less clear world top right then.
Chris:Yeah, well, I mean, and so like, if you look at Chris Wickham's definition of feudalism, right, which is a lot broader than having very than the very specific, only really existing in Western Europe version of feudalism, then yes, feudalism absolutely does exist, like all over the place, not just in Europe even. But if you, if you take that, this definition that he's talking about here, that they're nitpicking, then, yeah, maybe feudalism doesn't exist in some places, right?
Varn:So I think I think that is interesting. He quickly said notes that, like these phrases are more debated over by French than British historians, I love to know the British historiography of the time to know why, like why, the British don't argue about this because it seems like Americans don't shut the fuck up about it. But it must. We must have a Gallo brain rot as opposed to Anglo brain rot. I don't know. So.
Chris:Well, the British Academy? I don't know it. Is it more monolithic than the French Academy? Like? Is there less room for debate? I don't think so.
Varn:I know it's more. I know there's less rock star Like. There aren't rock star suburn lectures that are open to the public, that make it super famous, which created, like the 70s theory. And you know, industry, as we know, right Right, that doesn't exist. I also I do get the feeling, even more than America and definitely more than like at least the more famous French theorists, there are stricter delimitations on academic fields in in in Britain, and there's a whole long essay read by Lester McIntyre was like attacking the British system for for this and for its lack of, because it, he said it created current compartmentalized understanding, since it has no theological understanding of human nature. It can't that. The, the stuff can't speak to itself. And he was specifically talking about the structure, the post capitalist British academia. But I frankly don't know enough about academia in the 50s to be able to say the specific mechanism. I know that. I do know that of the university systems, despite the fact that we share a common language, the British system actually seems the most foreign to me.
Chris:Yeah, the friend yeah.
Varn:I'm like so a levels and this goes here and then do that, and then you get the this thing and it's really strict, but also like you don't have to take any classes when you're doing your dissertation. I don't get it like well and the American Academy.
Chris:Also. You can't just get a degree in the in England or the you know the UK and then come back to the United States. They have there's actually generally for I know a few people anyway, so this is totally anecdotal that I've had a really hard time transferring over their credits, essentially because they just can't make paper whenever and also and you have a PhD institution, unless it's something like Oxford or something, obviously. But, like you know, I know some people that went to smaller British universities and like no one's ever heard of them, so they're just like, yeah, well, we'll go ahead and hire someone from an American university instead. Even if it is more prestigious and better, if it's not one of the big ones, it's actually hard to get a job.
Varn:I mean that makes that makes sense. Yeah, we could talk about nepotism and academia another day, but right, because I think this part of was playing out there. I also think my first exposure to RHH, while we're talking about it, in the beginning of this chapter. That just remembered. He wrote the introduction to the Brenner debates. Oh yeah, so I think that is actually where I know him from. We get back to that thing, so we have. Can you tell us the origins of this French term that I'm going to butcher? Which one, fidelity or scenery? Either one. I mean scenery is translated roughly as a minorial system and fidelity is translated roughly as feudalism. And one of the things that I find interesting is like the debates and like American historiography is often like should we refer to feudalism as as minorialism? And I'm like, well, in France maybe both, I don't know like. So what's the origins of these two terms?
Chris:Well, I mean, I know that the, the Well, so scenery, you know, has its origins. Well, the concepts, I don't actually know about the word origins. I know they're Latin, but word origins are Latin and they go back to the late Roman period. So exactly what the word origins are. But I know that they have to do with specifically fair, that it has to do with the military agreement between a lord and a vessel, and senior read has to do with the economic domination and extraction of the menorial system, right? So like they're both part of the feudal system, right? And I think that's what Hilton argues here is like, whatever feudalism is, it has to encompass both terms. Yeah, I like that. He says he's not.
Jason:He says it's not my intention to engage in a scholastic dispute. And then later on he's in the same paragraph. He says if we do not use the word feudalism, we would have to invent one, and it would have to encompass within its definition both the two terms that Varn does want to say, because I also don't want to say them Féodalité and signore.
Chris:Féodalité and signore.
Jason:Yes, I guess.
Chris:Féodalité and, signore, fuedalism and menorialism, you just say that.
Jason:Yeah, so I like that. He says if we don't have the term feudalism, we just have a different word to describe the same thing.
Varn:So interestingly, signore, specifically comes from the French common law, so not the British, and it refers to land tenure or the holding of land, and it goes back to late antiquity.
Chris:A late Roman Empire.
Varn:Yeah, the late Roman Empire. And then it is maintained under the various crowns basically how things work with both the Merovingians and the Carolingians. So there you go. That makes perfect sense, right? It's the title of the landholder. That's where the word comes from. I was just looking at that.
Chris:Well, it comes from the same root word that signore in Spanish comes from and senior in English, meaning like senior, having more to do with, like a, not just being elderly but having attached to that, like gravitas, an authority.
Varn:Elderly landholder and thus an authority of the Hamlet or village or whatever, and that Latin word is like senorum or something. Yeah that makes sense, all right. The 18th century, he says, kept the terms because Marx used them. Then you know he was trying to do it to figure out capitalism, so it was used as a mode of distinguishment. I've been digging into a lot of the Marx literature on the transition because I've been reading a lot of like Carlos Gerito and a lot of how do I say this diplomatically?
Varn:less sophisticated Marxist, Leninists who will use the arguments about the teleology of social technologies. That's the way we would say it. That's not how Marx, that's it. But like what Marx would imply was like the way the totality changes the points of the whole to like argue that you can keep all the elements of you know the Marxist, Leninist argument. You can keep all the elements of capitalism, including value, production and ownership, not just money and private ownership, and still be communist because you're building for the people. And what's interesting is it got me reading those sections about and it's specifically when Marx writes about usury under feudalism and why it survives in capitalism and in capital volume two and three, but how it has a completely different function and form, even though its origins are pre-capitalist. And he also vaguely hints at that with the markets. Like it's like his way of saying yes, I know, markets pre-exist capitalism. That's not the point. The point is abstract labor and surplus value. Yeah, but you know, and so?
Chris:I, and Wickham actually makes that point later about the rise of capitalism. Right yeah, so he would disagree with Jairus Benaji.
Varn:Yeah, benaji, who well Benaji goes in the other way. Yeah, he doesn't quite remove all. He's not like my friends who just argue that economic periodizations are useless and meaningless because there's a continuity of, like civic groups or whatever. That's often how it's posited.
Chris:You mean some of the new forms have hold within them pieces of the old forms. Right.
Varn:And that doesn't help that I think that I think Volger Marxist actually go radically back and forth from whether or not there's a complete rupture between one form and another.
Chris:Yeah.
Varn:Or there's continuity, and sometimes the same people will be on both ends of the extreme version of that spectrum, depending on the fucking argument they're making, and they don't even realize that they are.
Jason:So I get why people have this misreading, but it's too bad also because if they just recognize that they were on both sides, that would be fine yeah.
Varn:You're going to be in a dialectic against yourself. That's fun.
Chris:Yeah, I mean it happens.
Varn:But I do think it's interesting here because this lays out the terms right Like and I think the seniority part of this we're going to skip the debate here, but the seniority part of this is actually, I think, sometimes either over or under emphasized from the feudal part of this. So you either emphasize the military slash, social fidelity relation, right Like, that's what feudalism is based off of, sort of yeah, and are you emphasize minor realism and the fact that, like you know, the collapsing of civic structures into private manners as a way of farming and avoiding taxes and late antiquity, yeah, and that is the origins of the lead, literally the origins of the legal structure of Western Europe, and that is kind of so generously unique to Western Europe. It doesn't happen in the Islamic, our Chinese world. That's interesting. I think Wicom gets around it by trying to take this essential elements of both and like not being really nailing down to a particular element of either. Right, but let's see how.
Varn:I think it's interesting, just that Hilton here really does start us off with like, look, we have to admit that both these things are going on in Britain and France, even if we're limiting our case to Britain and France, to understand Britain and France, and thus the origins of both nationalism and capitalism in Europe, because those are the places that comes. Well, in the Italian city, states for capitalism, but for national, for national capitalism, it's France and Britain. You really need to understand this. So I think it's a. I think it's a pretty ingenious way of like both encapsulating the debate and avoiding it in a paragraph.
Jason:Why? Yeah, it's valuable because it's like he says let's acknowledge that exists, but then let's not engage in it because he's he does engage in it and he says basically, he says it's not important enough for him to engage in because he's right, and that's what he says, that he moves on.
Chris:And like really the? The Marxist version of what feudalism is encompasses both terms in its definition anyway, so there's really no point in like worrying about it. If you're, if you're arguing to Marxists or with Marxists, then you know these are moot, the distinctions are moved.
Jason:You have to have a different debate about feudalism with Marxists like yeah. Yeah you know whatever.
Varn:You actually have to have a debate of how much is actually the base versus a superstructure?
Jason:Yeah, and like the idea that the reason why feudalism doesn't exist anymore is because of the class struggle, and peasants struggled against the Lords and one. It's just.
Varn:That's just not true, you know it's not true, and the funny thing is, I don't think Marx thinks it's true either, but it is the Marxist reading and it's basically based off of a fucking like sentence. Yep.
Jason:It's based off of one portion of one sentence.
Chris:Yeah, what the opening lines of the manifesto? Yep.
Varn:Yes.
Chris:That's it. That's where it comes from.
Varn:And like and like a gloss by by Ingalls in a letter like. Those are the two places you can find that interpretation. But when you actually go back and read Marx, there's no like Glenn, glorious peasant uprising. That's not how he actually thinks the bourgeois uprisings happened Like no.
Chris:In fact, like if you read the peasant war in Germany by Ingalls. He distinctly lays out the limitations of peasant uprisings and how there's no possibility for them to be able to carry, you know, to be the vehicle for carrying on the class struggle.
Jason:Well then also Marx says the same thing in the 18th Bromero, except like very, very clearly and whatever.
Varn:Well, I mean what's interesting about the room? I mean the what models this later and marks and we're getting into the weeds here already, we're not even through the first paragraph. But what models this and Marx is that there are concessions that peasant communes later that are like like hard to square with what he writes in the Bromero. We talked about this.
Chris:And in the last one, where we mentioned the intro to the manifesto right, marx says possibly the mere system or the, whatever was the system called Jason, the, the abyssinia, the abyssinia right in Russia could be the basis for a you know, establishing communism in Russia.
Jason:I think a critical thing is just to say that, like when he's talking about France and we're talking about Russia, he's talking about two different places.
Varn:This is the thing I think it's really important. When people think that, like the stages of modes of production or universal and marks and that is a common interpretation, it was Orthodox and the second international, I think you have to deal with the fact that there's stuff that marks rights, that seems to be very area specific, yeah, and and it does sort of like well, I may. You know, reading the later stuff about, about Russia, doesn't make me go. Well, maybe I should be careful about extrapolating from France and his writings on France the pattern for the whole fucking world.
Jason:Yeah, like but I think some of the best writing from the second international is from the non Germans just telling the Germans hey, that's different over here.
Varn:Right, yeah, yeah, like I mean eventually that becomes the entire world telling the Germans like hey, it's different over here and also you failed. So well, yeah, but but anyway, the. I think that's interesting to take in as the background to this debate though, because this is one of these essays that you feel like the interlocutors here are multiple. There are kinds of vulgar Marxist. They're the non Marxist dominant history or graphic tradition of medieval studies in England and I don't know the 70s, the, it's probably us.
Varn:I mean, you know some vague sense like this is aimed at a bunch of different groups at once, and I actually find this is another thing I really appreciate about the British polemics is they can actually make a polemic against like five people, five completely different people, but how they make it is interesting and it's different and it's something I really appreciate about them. They make a positive argument. That's why they're doing a instead of just like a shit fight, are a critical critique, and I you know as a person who believes in Ruthless criticism of everything, I do really like winning a dispute with a positive argument.
Jason:Right, yeah, I Mean there's a reason why it's worth reading beyond just the debate. It's also worth reading because it's arguing for something.
Varn:Exactly so. I guess the first thing that we have to think he says reducing feudalism to serfdom is as bad as Saying without their, you know, without fiefdom, there's no feudalism. And I think that that kind of dual edge is interesting as as a as a response to this, you know, I will say, one of Marxist Marvogar footnotes is when he says that capitalism started in Italy, in a footnote in capital Because it got rid of serfdom first, and I'm like that's not enough.
Jason:Let me run off at all, because serfdom predates capitalism.
Varn:So obviously you need more. Yeah, I mean serfdom predates. Oh, I mean, you know them.
Jason:Yeah, yeah, but also, yeah, what I, what I meant to say was a free labor predates feudalism and thus capitalism, and so on.
Chris:Yeah, yeah so the I mean one of the later chapters of this Wickham goes into a A lot of detail about why he doesn't think that capitalism started in northern Italy, and one of those reasons is because they never got rid of feudal overlords. Like you still had towns subordinate to feudal overlords right, and their bourgeois class.
Varn:I mean, this is true in Britain too, honestly, yeah, but their bourgeois class is core. If you really like, study it. I mean, this is one of the Pareto points, right? It's like the feudal overlords became the bourgeoisie way.
Chris:Well, specifically like in Venice. Absolutely right, you just switched them out. But in Florence, I think there's more of an argument to make.
Varn:I know that's not.
Chris:That's not what we're talking about here, but they threw out the feudal overlords and Banned them from coming into the city. So like I don't know that this might be worth getting into more whenever we actually get to that section. But there is, I think, some argument about that and I don't necessarily know if I'm 100% on Hilton's side for that.
Varn:I think this is gonna be I the vagaries around the origins of capitalism is always interesting to me because for me, like I See a lot of the arguments for Italy Valid. But if I take some of those arguments I could even argue that there's monasteries in fucking France in the 14th century that actually meet the criterion. They just don't become socially like, socially viable enough to and they don't break out of the church.
Chris:Well, they're basically running co-ops, right yeah?
Varn:they're running co-ops at for a profit because of a labor shortage, for, for you know, for like mananzas institutions, basically like yeah.
Jason:There's a couple of cases to make, depending on where you look that in, into Austria even and the only thing that's really discerning is that capitalism developed out of feudalism all over kind of over a long period of time and almost imperceptibly and I would.
Chris:I would say, with a caveat, that any Capitalism that may or may not have existed in northern Italy was abortive right, because there was reassertion of the rule of the feudal overlords Period of a hundred, a few hundred years.
Varn:That's just kind of a lot of back and forth. Yeah, these monastic co-ops in France and Austria too, yeah, like. So one of the things I think that One of the things I think it's always interesting to me because I'm like okay, even if I accept that it that northern Italy may be the origins because of that in the Byzantine trade routes, and whatever I, the first capitalist nation state is England and the second is France. Why I just there's it is that is absolutely undisputable to me.
Jason:So like even the, the. The Netherlands is like a prehistory of that, but England is still first.
Varn:Yeah. People who push back on me like well, well, you know, the Netherlands developed capitalism, like yeah, but they weren't. There wasn't a coherent nation state, the way England was like yeah, like.
Jason:England looked at the Netherlands and they were like, we like that, but we're gonna do it better.
Varn:And then they did, and that's what we call capitalism right and I do think this is where, like, I Think one of the things, the other thing that we can say that Marxist do poorly, that helped, ends avoiding here I Want to point it out is the political part of political economy, because that's something I always get frustrated by, when people just solely operating off economic stuff and they're like, oh, it's the base and laws the superstructure, and I'm like, yeah, but like the superstructure determines parts of the base because it determines the relations of fucking production which are unquestionably the core of the base. The mode doesn't emerge from nowhere.
Chris:And the base is the base is changed by the superstructure right. Rest upon it. There's like a Relationship between them. It's dialectical.
Varn:Right. Well, this is the problem. It for me, is like that the metaphor is helpful for a little while, until people start really reducing to it, and then it's a disaster. Like it's like because it leads to vulgar ass Economism. Right, like it's just like it leads to GA Cohen.
Chris:I remember I, I taught a, I taught a couple of a little Episode, an episode, a couple of lectures for my Professor on feudalism, and instead of saying base and stoop superstructure, I said the soil, the economic soil that gave birth to the, this, the, the, you know, the, the branches, the, the trunk and branches of feudalism, and I talked about the relationship between the way that the, the, the plant, the tree itself changed the soil and the soil like, nourished the tree, so it's like base and stooper structure, yeah, but you know, with a more sort of organic bent to it that leaves room for that relation, that, uh, symbiotic relationship.
Jason:It's just base and stooper structure, but like without any of the hangups that people have about saying those words, it's just yeah, that's why I did that. It's just the actual way that they should talk about it the reason.
Chris:The reason I did that is because my professor said I drank the wicom Kool-Aid. So I was trying not to sound as Marxist as I was. It's like little.
Varn:Do you know, good doctor, that I was had drank the Marx Kool-Aid's way before the wicom Kool-Aid, so the wicom Kool-Aid came down pretty easily. Yeah, um, no, well to me. Um, I guess this is these discussions. One of the reasons I was interested in this and interested in Helton but I'm interested in this whole thing about feudalism is to save Marxism's social understandings from itself as much as to defend it. Yeah um, because vulgar Marxism is probably worse than no Marxism at all.
Varn:I know that's probably true, yeah like and and I I just like when you like, when you think, oh, there's just modes and it happens because of. I mean, you can get to the jacoan when it's like, oh, it happens because of technological accumulation, and I'm like, okay, a couple of people who feel that way, yeah, and that's just wiggish history, like that's, that's not really. That doesn't have that much to do with Marxism. Nor do I think it's true. Like, of the things we're critiquing, that seems to be the least true.
Varn:Um, and I my examples of that is always like thinking about the kinds of technologies that dropped away in the in the late and late antique, early medieval period, but the and we talked about this in the wicom series but that did not cause a depreciable decline in life expectancy, even though you saw a decline in like population like um, you know we talked about roads and and ancient architecture but like even stuff like Handsaws and shit, like like the people, just they went back to axes, we didn't need handsaws anymore and like they, even though handsaws you could find, handsaws like rotting around, getting on rusty, like we still found them. So they could clearly find them, um, and yet they didn't try to reinvent it and and I think that that to me, those kinds of things really push against this like Wiggish view of history, and I just don't actually think Marx held it and if he did, he was wrong like it's. It's that simple, like.
Jason:Yeah, it's like if you're trying to be a Marxist and you're trying to think like Marx, then you shouldn't be able to sound a lot like Steven Pinker.
Varn:Yeah.
Chris:And so to get to to this on uh, on feudalism, we have to look at both the political side and the economic side, and and those distinctions Are a post capitalist, post liberal innovation right nobody pre like 16, 1600s thinks about the word like economic, political, religious fears are separate right like like at all Like it would not even be comprehensible really, there's not a language for it like um the, the idea that there are different spheres, the, the idea that there are different spheres of influence for the church and the state, uh right, were hotly, hotly disputed with, I mean, you know, the, on many occasions, the uh the church, yeah, but the brains of thomas beckett, like really do, uh, make it clear that, um, that it was hotly disputed and and actually england's ability to Assert its dominance over the church has a lot to do with it coalescing into the, the, the first Real, what looks like the first modern nation state, right.
Varn:It's the pre west failure. Nation state right like it, and then unified france. Unified france takes longer, but like and and then.
Chris:But they actually never really have that break in church but separation of church and state.
Varn:They just integrate the the church into the mechanisms of control in the state which, my unpopular opinion, is a lot of the myth and understandings of all too Sayre is because he's french and not because, like some, like french blood knowledge, but because french understanding of laws and political and repressive apparatuses or whatever are all based on Uh. States having a much more absolute relationship to the general public, then, is found like, even in like more explicitly to tetherian societies, like like hobbs would never claim some of the shit that all too serious claims the state can do why oh to to to clear something up to a caveat, so I don't get yelled at for not making this.
Chris:So did england. England did incorporate the church into the mechanism of the state after the reformation right.
Jason:Very nobody carried out the reformation, thinking it's only going to be this one area and then economically and politically those, those other areas are separate. You know they would, they, they were carrying out what we now regard as a reformation in their own locality on economic and political terms, for economic and political reasons, and then also, yeah, I guess, when they.
Varn:We're gonna have to read the fucking max vapor book in the sub, like is he right for the wrong reasons or is he wrong why, um, um weren't that big? Yeah, I, yeah, I. I sometimes think I mean that people forget the debates about that because we don't want to talk about the other half of that debate, which is a samba debate, which is capitalism is the jew's fault, as is communism, although I was once a communist shut up like Right so well.
Chris:I think that there are merits To vapor's argument and his argument about the de sacralization process in the. The triumph of capital that happens within the triumph of capitalism holds more true than his Protestant work ethic claims. But there's some. I think there's some truth there as well.
Jason:Well, um yeah, does that have to be the only thing that anyone ever reads about? About this?
Varn:No, I mean unfortunately, people just they don't read enough. Although as a as a real deep dive for for the for the true history nerd heads, I learned so much about reformation Names and I was like why don't we give people weird, sinless long names, like like god has great break bones, why he got just? I'm just like I want those to come back.
Jason:It's time for another reformation like puritan naming conventions.
Varn:Yeah, yeah, like, like god so loved the world, and also I spilled this beer like, yeah, your second son, um, anyway, uh, feudalism, and so I think Hilton's insistence here that we do have to deal with the thief, the economic and the feudal, the political, and also realize that those divisions are ours, not theirs, and there's no, it could have been theirs, like yeah they're kind of fake in our world but they're not even conceivable in their world, like the division.
Varn:I mean, yeah, right, so so uh, he talks we get into 1066 and I'm gonna let chris kind of lead this. So what? What does hilton say?
Chris:I mean obvious other than the obvious about 1066 1066 is uh, you know, for those who don't know when william the conqueror Conquers that's what he's famous for and becomes the king of england when he becomes, when he moves from William the bastard or William the conquer.
Chris:Yeah, uh, and you know, see, a total loser up until he conquers england which wasn't really fair, because he got there right after they got done fighting off a Viking invasion and then mops up and becomes, you know, uh, it establishes the, the, the dynasties, the set of dynasties that actually still is, you know, I know, never mind, the newest one is there the fucking german one. Anyway, sorry, um.
Varn:I do claim lineage back to. I mean, like when you count your kings, yeah, they got?
Chris:they've got some tenuous claim to being related to the the that same lineage. Okay, so Um.
Varn:I mean, but he, he are uh just to uh To point out that he thinks that the 11th century, when the french style came to england, is when the coherence of feudalism is solidified. So like he doesn't seem to think that they're like anglo-saxon feudalism is particularly coherent right, right, yeah, so the the anglo I'm sorry, go ahead, no, go ahead, no.
Chris:I was gonna say yeah. Like the anglo-saxon system is much more akin to something that like a pre feudal organization, but was, but the Method of military organization is still similar, right, and that you, you have retainers with that raise up a military, uh, like military force, like they bring their peasants with sharpened stakes and then there's a couple of warriors they bring them, but like it's not coherent at all, not the way that the norman system is. The norman system is the most coherent feudal system in the strongest feudal system, and you can, you can see that and looking at the way that it's applied in normandy and uh, the kingdom of the two sissiles and france, you know, and uh, even to a certain extent in jerusalem, which is the the least coherent of the norman, um impositions of their version of feudalism, um.
Varn:And what's interesting is he argues hilton argues that it's the most coherent. It's the most coherent in england because they're able to establish themselves as a new elite when none of the baggage are being tied into other hereditary elites, right um, in france, like. So he's like it that you know it's. It wasn't a perfect hierarchy of obligation because of barons and and few folding vessels, and all that in france because there's all this other pre late roman, you know stuff around. But when they establish themselves in england they're able to be like no, we are it, we.
Chris:We now establish the top down feudal chain, bam, like yeah, the, uh, it's writing on a blank slate, as opposed to trying to negotiate the pre existing structures that exist in in france. Uh, the, the, the norman state itself within normandy, the self-contained norman state, is much, but looks much more like what we think of feudalism than the rest of france, which has, of course, it's uh, uh, common law practices that exist. Because, yeah, when, because when you think of common law, we always think of english common law, but you know, european common law was what everyone based their legal systems on, until the napoleonic code, right? Um, so, yeah, I mean, it was the imposition of a blank slate Of their system on top of a blank slate, and they very consciously constructed it and it wasn't like a just just the response. It was the, you know, the imposition of what they had elsewhere, but in conditions that were, uh, just that, where there was nothing to oppose them.
Varn:And this leads to hilton's next point. I think is really interesting that this is a stronger claim than just a coherent landowning class. Right, could you have that in an anglo-sac than england like that's not, it's it's at. The landownling class in the military class are like you know, and lockstep in a way that you don't kind of see again until like the 20th century. Yeah.
Chris:Yeah, I mean to a certain extent there's not much of a difference between the land holding and the military class, Right?
Varn:But I think that's the point, whereas, like there is kind of a difference between the land holding classes and the military classes, and like the Anglo-Saxon system, you do have like small warlords and shit yeah, even though they're subordinate to the king. Also, I think this explains to me something I could never figure out. Like, how did the kingship in England get so strong that it had to be checked by the mobility in a way that, like the kingship in the Anglo-Saxon England never did? And it seems to me like the plenaginists were operating off of a much more functional feudal order. Like, and if you guys go back and listen to the Wickham series, one of the things that we talk about with the Carolingians and the Merringians and like Spain right, is like they have completely different.
Varn:They have like multiple systems of incoherent laws. Some come from the church, some come from Rome. There's like there's local, there's local traumatic traditions that are incorporated in. There's like visit Gothic customs. It's all a mess, and that's kind of true in England too, until the Normans come in and they're like, well, we come in from it out. We have established a chain. We can rationalize all of this from a central authority of the Norman rulership of London and go.
Chris:The process of defining. So the process of the application of or the creation of feudal law is something that comes along in the 12th century. You have how long between the collapse of the Roman Empire until the 12th century, before there is a, there are systems of feudal law that are being applied, and that's because canon law was evolving to deal with the problems of the feudal land relationships and military relationships the entire time. So feudal jurists began to. When I say feudal jurists, I mean just jurists that are dealing with the legal application of feudal law or the creation of feudal law. Feudal jurists take from canon law and create a law system to set on top of what already exists. So it's like you had. This is truly a situation of the base proceeding the superstructure by miles and miles and miles before something is finally constructed on top of it, like in most of Europe.
Jason:Yeah, and that's not replicated anywhere else, is it?
Chris:As far as feudalism is concerned, yeah, no, I think that there's an argument to be made that there's something of a feudal system that involves in the Byzantine Empire as well, called the Pranoia system.
Varn:Right, but the imperial system is still strong enough there that it's still the predominant system, and I think this goes to explain why strong feudal states are kind of a French and England thing, whereas the other strong states are all not feudal, like quasi-Roman, late antique empires, like the. Islamicate empires and China.
Chris:And the Byzantine for a certain extent.
Varn:Yeah, and the Byzantine, which has a direct relationship to the Islamicate empires. They inform each other.
Chris:It is literally the Roman Empire.
Varn:Right, yeah, yeah, I mean when people go they talk about Muslim predictions, about Rome and they're like yeah, they're talking about Constantinople, doofus.
Chris:And really the Pranoia system doesn't really devolve into a hereditary fief system until the empire is well along it's well past the apogee and into its centuries-long collapse Right.
Varn:Yeah, this is interesting because, to bring up a non-Marxist thinker that I appreciate, but that you probably didn't think was going to come up here that the collapse system and the devolution of the holding system that you're talking about, according to Joseph Tainter, its origins was actually a way to simplify the empire in terms of social energy inputs, which enabled it to survive, but when it decayed, it decayed into feudalism, which was super complicated, yeah, so yeah, that makes sense yeah, which I think is a really interesting way to frame it.
Varn:It's not a Marxist way of framing it, but I don't think it's also in contradiction with a Marxist way of framing it so.
Varn:OK, so we have now in our first hour got through a page, so I want to get through at least another paragraph. So I think this interesting point about the actual nature of Lord and Vassal because he seems to think, for example, I'll just read this verbatim because it's useful. It is often assumed that the mutual ties of personal dependence is the port between Lord and Vassal which knit together. The regional aristocracies continued downwards to embrace also the peasantry. There could be no greater error. The dependent peasant was not a small-scale vassal holding land for services which happened to be agricultural rather than military, Petty though the village night might be, he not only shared the ethos of the baron, he also stood with the baron on one side of the great divide in medieval society. Both flimmed from the fused of surplus labor of the peasants, Peasants themselves had no means constituted a homogenous class.
Varn:That's interesting, that's actually an interesting claim that I want to come back to because that's actually I think that would be contentious and Marxism Already. By the 11th century there were, on one hand, families in possession of land adequate to maintain them as well as provide rents and services for the Lord. On the other hand, there are already families of small holders that had to eat cattle, living by laboring for the Lord's. Demes are holdings of richer peasants are by doing craft work or by gathering or poaching, and I think that's interesting because I think we just see that Hilton saying look, there actually is a Kulag distinction.
Jason:Well, yeah, when Lenin is writing the development of capitalism in Russia, one of the central arguments that the peasantry is actually not one class but it's stratified and maybe is even three emergent classes, and specifically here oh sorry, hilton is saying there's at least two.
Chris:Yeah, I mean in this system, the feudal system of France, you have very clearly three, I think serfs, free peasants that are eking out a subsistence living, and then the richer peasants that may or may not be either serfs or free peasants.
Jason:Right, yeah, but they are landholders.
Chris:They are landholders, all of them, yeah, yeah. Whose immediate interest is survival and eking out just a few more potatoes that are not potatoes, I guess, because that's a new world crop. Whatever Turnips, turnips a few more turnips. Eking out a few more turnips than they did last year for to either sell for a profit or have more food, whatever.
Varn:Well, also particularly Turnips are barely corn.
Jason:My friend None of the peasants, rich or poor, lived according to the aristocratic ethos, though it was precisely at this time that the old Indo-Germanic theme of divinely ordained division of society between those who prayed and those who fought and those who worked was being revived in learned theory. Yeah, which is just to say that we have had a discussion recently. The most recent episode we posted was about, in part, class formation and the political part of political economy, and this is just another angle.
Varn:That it's very obvious, yeah absolutely, and I think that's interesting, and also I think it's interesting then, though, that we are able to say look, the vassal is not the integration with vassal and lord is not the integration of peasant and vassal at all.
Varn:The vassal is not a sentimental class that aligns with a coherent peasantry, the way that I don't know class collaboration. Let's imagine the petit bourgeois and the workers do in our society when they also imagine the PMC and the capitalist as copacetic sometimes. And as for analysis, I think this is actually really important because I do think Lenin's. Even though I would not defend decoologization as a means, at least not the way it was done, I tend to think Bacarren's point about how you had to do that was probably way more accurate. Yeah.
Varn:Bacarren should have been in charge of decoologization Right because you're not going to create a whole bunch of people who now hate you because you killed their families.
Jason:Yeah, yeah, it's really clear that the revolution was Lenin, the Savor was Trotsky and then building the Soviet state, the immediate post-war, that was Bacarren.
Varn:Yeah.
Jason:But we just didn't get that far.
Varn:No, stalin tried to be all three and ended up being none. Right, and I think that's. I think, though, that this here is actually kind of interesting in understanding the structure of feudal tensions. Right, because I'd always gone, like well, why don't peasants really see themselves as a coherent class? Because I do think this may be analogous to why workers don't see themselves as a coherent class and fully develop capitalism, so like Like, which, I think I think actually as far as, like our vulgar Marxism concerns, this is part of why I'm generally pessimistic, and I don't think, like just fixing the fact that people might hold property or the division between the first and third world, or any of that actually addresses the question at all. Like.
Varn:I think it's actually a way to avoid the problem of the question.
Jason:Yeah, yeah, because it's a way to obscure the problem. Yeah.
Varn:Right when it's like. You know, the only class that seems to act coherently is the bourgeoisie, and in our time, I would say they do so by their absenteeism, so like, because you know, they just send the fun shit and back away. That's all they seem to do.
Varn:Works though, yeah, it does work. So, when we look at the, when we look at this, though, like and again, I'm bringing this up because people might go why are you guys so obsessed with needle history? Because I'm like, look, on one hand, I want to defend that our distinctions, that there is a distinction between, like, the feudal world and the capitalist world, is really important to understanding everything. But I also want to point out that, like, if you really study this stuff, a lot of the problems that you see in our current society, they're not the same, but there you can start seeing, like, why we have issues with them and the issues that emerged in prior societies and fully developed, like, like you know, modes of political economy. Because one of the things I would say about, about studying the high middle ages versus, you know, the late antiquity of the early middle ages, is the high middle ages are more coherent, at least in France and England.
Chris:So we do have something very specifically we can see, like also, I think it's really that we understand the worldview as it existed, of the medieval person as compared to the post enlightenment. Subject Right Right Of the individual existing in the medieval world as merely a part of a collective and not as an individual as such not the way that we understand it. Anyway, I think that's super important and I think it's, like you know, the dialectical synthesis of that worldview. The member of Christendom, you know, or whatever and the individual in the Enlightenment is what we hope to see come to fruition under Marxism or under communism.
Jason:What we want to see is the old, pre-individual, sublated through the experience of the individual.
Chris:Right To create the secular Christendom Right. Yeah, I know people hate that terminology, but I like it.
Varn:Yeah, I mean, I get what you do and I guess my thought about this is like it's also removing, like the post enlightenment subject formation in some ways is as dishonest as the Christendom subject formation and that's something that I think Well, these are aspirational terms, absolutely.
Chris:Right.
Varn:But I mean, but I do think it's actually really important to point out, because I'm like well, one of the things that makes our individualism so readily available is we just lie to ourselves about it, right? And I don't, interestingly, as for much as we can say that the medieval world lied to itself about all kinds of shit, and it did. It didn't lie to itself about that, like that is not a delusion that it had, yeah, so I think that's really something to think about Now, why it didn't have it was probably not great, but just like everything else, every other social phenomenon that we ever talk about, there are.
Chris:There are the negative and positive aspects of it.
Varn:Yeah Well, you know, trying to tell people that nothing is ever purely regressive or progressive really bugs them, so I don't like that.
Chris:It's just like it's like no man go ahead, especially when you're talking about the medieval world right?
Jason:Oh yeah, because they have to either be able to turn it up or down. Volume up, volume down, that's it. Those are the two, the two modes. The idea that some parts might be better loud and some parts might be better quiet is just that's too much to think about.
Varn:I well, I also think and this, this is, this is I'm going to pick up from a conservative and just friend of mine, but I think it's something is right A lot of the justification of the present is actually based off of the demonization of the past, both the most recent past and the deep past. Yeah, like like every time, every time I see socialists see like, well, the world was always shitty and I was like dude. Most of medieval Europe was not the fucking calamitous 14th century or whatever. Like it's not. You know, it wasn't all plagues and short life and no, it actually wasn't that. Like no, nobody was rich the way we are rich in the United States. That's true, but like.
Jason:They also didn't work as hard and they weren't stressed.
Varn:The concept of depression, like as a, as a clinical thing, it didn't exist.
Jason:Yes, it was exclusively situational, you know. And the other thing is like the the kind of thinking that sees the past as worse than the present is usually shared by the same people who think that the present is also not any good, but the future is when it's going to start getting good. So there's always. There's always, whatever, whatever's current and whatever has already happened, it's all bad and later on it's all going to be good. But there's no. The separation between those two is a. It's like two different worlds, you know. There's there's no bleed over from one to the other.
Varn:Yeah, the idea of politics and history is just rupture, right.
Chris:Yeah, Like no continuity, just rupture.
Varn:Right, it's like, oh, there's, you know, there. I mean it is weird. I don't like saying like, hey, stuff has Christian formations, but like, unless I really don't have a good explanation for why Western, Western, post-Christian people, in specific, are given towards calamity, then then good, and you're the Elias. The Elias, Well, not everybody thinks an apocalypse is like that man, Like we really don't. Like. Some people think in cycles, some, you know, some groups thinking, but like the whole, like progress, progress, progress. Calamity, utopia is like. And that's always where I'm like, yes, accelerationism is stupid, oh, miserationism is stupid, Catastrophism is stupid.
Jason:I remember at one point the Neil Davidson's book, the how Revolutionary Were the Bush War Revolutions, was like a popular one and it was being discussed and a bunch of bunch of ISO people were just like they really got hung up on the fact that he talks a lot about the concepts of revolution and the in a in an astronomers sense and the. You know, people just didn't like that. They couldn't, you know, they couldn't accept and they couldn't get over the fact that that was the point of revolution and in the way that it was originally used and the way that was used politically for a very long time, is about regeneration, which is to say it's just to suggest that, at least in some people's mind, some good has already happened. So we should do that, but more, and that is revolution.
Varn:Right, they would say that's either reformism or even, like be Burkian conservatism or something. Yeah, I, neil Davidson, even though he's Scottish, would not like to be linked in with our English four betters, that's right, yeah. What is also in these clear Marxist that people don't like because they write too clearly?
Jason:British.
Varn:Yeah, I mean, although you know I would have people want to understand my books to read on revolution right now there's a bunch of them but I didn't list. I've made reading lists and I forgot it and I was kicking myself because how blue, how revolutionary with the blue I think should be read with inso traversals current book of revolutions like side by side.
Jason:Yeah, it's really good.
Varn:And so I guess I guess it's also interesting the last thing, and we're going to I think we should probably wrap this up, but we're going to get three whole paragraphs and by me covering this, he talks about a grand society, you know, over the course of five centuries and like there's a. There's huge changes, but what's interesting is that despite these huge changes, the social order is relatively stable, like, and the thing that you have to remember is you cannot just assume that the village community was a collective of individual producers who just worked out like the Treasury of Commons or whatever, and not what is going on. There's no way to understand that. He's like.
Varn:You know, he insists for example, the peasant family holding was never a complete economy. It was an incomplete economy. You could not actually subsist off of it by just that labor and it always needed at least some manufactured goods such as salt and dairy products that were beyond this purview, even for peasants. So there was, it was never like. The idea of the self sufficient subsistence peasant does not apply to medieval England, if it ever applied anywhere, why? Right, and that's. I think that's pretty big to think about like that. That is because I do think this tendency to to view like, well, the peasant was an atomized family and it was like a nuclear family, and like you had your plot holding and you live it off the plot and you just had to pay your rents to the to the Lord, and that was oppressive but you were pretty much on your own. That's not true.
Jason:Right, I mean, the village community plays a central role in England, just as well as in Russia and everywhere Really.
Varn:Right, and he talks about, like there's tons of resources that are either dependent on access to feudal holdings or to the commons, you know, pastures, meadowland, timber, stone, forging rights, hunting rights, etc. Right.
Chris:I mean like there's a reason why the, the Falkish nationalists in Germany, look to medieval peasants as their vision of a collectivist society. Right, and it's because it's that marriage of individualism as well as collectivism. You have the, the peasant family that exists as an individual unit and there is a certain amount of individualism, and you do have mastery over your little plot of land, but you cannot exist without the help of the collective Right.
Varn:Yeah, which I think is interesting because there's Marx writings that indicates he understands this. But if you take the classic Marx writings about peasants in France and specific, it does sound like he thinks they're itemized individual, like subsistence farmers who are isolated from society in a way that leads them to not have strong communities.
Jason:Oh yeah, I mean the, the, the, the peasant in France at the turn of the, I mean when the 19th century is bearing down on you. They have a different kind of a. I mean, he doesn't explain it, but it's different than the 13th and 14th centuries.
Varn:Right, I mean people take that. I mean I've known people who talk about that as like the condition of the peasant forever and I'm like that's just not true. It's not even true of a lot of like peasant-ish societies today, like like one of the things that you go, if you go to like a small Mexican village that still has something that's approaching a peasantry, like you know, subsistence farmers who are paying taxes and doing like a side gig or whatever, which it's about as close as you're going to get in the modern world, who who might own small plots and might have access to common lands that are just not claimed. Right that those people seem less alienated in their social structures than like urban, urban dwelling capitalist or rural capitalist in the United States, who do seem pretty isolated. Like, yeah, and I think it's interesting because I think we think about the description of the peasant in France and like the Bermere and during the Civil War writings, the French of War, the French Revolutionary Civil War writings, as a description of peasants eternally, and I don't think that's true. I don't think Marx thought that. You know, I don't think. And I think the more you study medieval England and France you realize that that's definitely not true that the conditions of the peasantry that Marx is talking about is specific to that time.
Varn:Right, and I think that's a really important thing to emphasize. Like it really does make. It leads you to not make certain mistakes. You know, I think is one of the things that you know, I think anarchists often criticize Marxist on. That I think may be somewhat fair is like the fact that like, even like, quote libertarian socialists stupid fucking name will will. Will, like fight peasants, like like the McGonis, end up fighting the Zapatistas, for example, in favor of the liberal government and ironically, the Zapatistas get the land reform they want and McGonis don't get shit. But I think that comes from this idea that like the peasants is always alienated, like, and that's driving them and it's not, and it's in Marx. But it's not just like people who want to go, oh, it's just like the Bolsheviks. No, it's, it is. It comes from people misreading Marx in all kinds of traditions.
Jason:I know it's a problem like the German social democrats were like very hustles of the peasants, and when they finally decided to do peasant outreach, it was just about how, like pretty soon you'll be workers and then you know whatever, then you'll matter and imagine that. And meanwhile, you know, communists in Russia were, like they did, a different land better.
Varn:I mean, I do like to remind people that the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasant as equal status, and the dictatorship of the proletariat is a linen formation.
Chris:explicitly it's one of his innovations right, Like, yeah, like the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.
Varn:Yeah, right, I mean yeah the.
Chris:The Bolsheviks I mean, it's not like the Bolsheviks really had a different idea than the social democrats did about the nature of the peasantry. They thought that if the peasants could be brought into the coalition and then proletarianized, then they could skip over inconvenient parts of what needed to happen in order to have a stable state.
Jason:Right, I mean, and and, fair enough, they weren't able to, so yeah right.
Varn:I mean, that's the irony. This is one of the end notes points for people who read in that's volume four, thing that I am super critical of. But it does make a point that I think is actually valid about peasantries In the 20th century. The peasant revolutions didn't see one thing. They didn't become socialists like we predicted they're at least not in any meaningful sense but they did get rid of the peasantry as a class.
Varn:They carried out bourgeois revolutions, right, I mean, that's basically like, like that's the weird, if you, if you read that, you're like oh so basically like the peasantry carried out a bourgeois revolution by, I guess, accelerating the division of the peasant class into either a surplus labor class or into various kinds of capitalists or bourgeois, et cetera. So like, like, you know, that's what the revolutions did once you kicked out the colonial empires that were you know. So I think that's interesting and I think this is relevant to that. That's the key point, I think. I think we should stop here because the next section is going to get real expansive.
Chris:And we're already like over an hour.
Varn:Yeah, and I think we're going to have to let you know because it's going to start contrasting England to France and I think I'm going to have to do some external reading to make sure that I agree with this. So, yeah, so I hope you guys go find this book. This book is fascinating to cover all of it. But like the chapter chapter 11 popular movements in England at the end of the 14th century is fucking like I learned stuff from that and all those you go. Why are you referring them to as those like chapter names? These are all discrete essays. Like they're not right, like you can read, you can dip in and out of this book. So we just picked three because they were useful. But, like when we were, when we were dividing this I will say this as we wrap up I was having trouble figuring out which ones we were going to do because, like, every one of these essays is useful to the topic we're talking about.
Chris:Like I read the this one and then two later ones recently, and then I've read all of this before. But like we couldn't just with the way, at the pace that we go through things, I didn't think it would be a good idea to try to do the whole book.
Varn:No, this would be a five year series at that point We'd still be talking about this after you, after you have finished your dissertation. And if we did that, by that point you might as well have done a rambly dissertation on Hilton too, while you finish your own.
Chris:Yeah, well, I finished my own on the on the weirdo people who romanticized medieval Europe in the 20th century.
Varn:I mean it is interesting that you kind of flirted with becoming a medievalist and then you decided to study the modernist who flirted with becoming medieval.
Chris:Yeah, I mean, like the entire thing that I'm focusing on now is how the the German quote, unquote German socialists in the Werner Sombart sense of the word. Right, yeah, the.
Varn:German historical school socialists would Mark's called those guys the armchair socialists. And it's interesting because I've heard like post leftists say, well, marx critiques socialism. I'm like, yeah, but you're not even talking about who was. Who was referring to. It wasn't like it wasn't even Les Allians, it was like like like the, the pre neo, the pre chart list and shit, that's yeah after he's going after, essentially going after the proto vol, pro-focus socialists. Right.
Chris:Yeah, like the, the real, the real socialists, or the, or what he calls German socialists.
Varn:Right, I mean so like that's see, just as a side note, just so people know who we're talking about. That Sombart's the end of that tradition, although Sombart's interesting because Sombart was kind of a Marxist at one point.
Chris:Sombart writes a book on German socialism, defining what it is, wherein he like synthesizes a bunch of different ideas that you could really trace back to Fichte as being like the first, the first person that set them down and codified them, but like that, the the national socialism of Germany. Small and small s right, right yeah.
Varn:And so I think we're like, when we talk about these guys, we're talking about Gustav von Schmoller, aldos Wagner, the George Friedrich Knapp which has been made famous by by MM Tears, but that's who we're talking about. And LaSalle's interesting because he's kind of a train them in the rest of the socialist movement, Like. But all those like focused socialists, they're all class collaborationists explicitly Like. That's the thing If the social for them means like it almost is a way like the Italians use corporate, so it means something different.
Chris:Oh, absolutely, yeah, it's almost like like a guild socialism. Right, that's right. That's what they mean. Sort of sort of a corporatism. But like I mean, if you look like in the Otto Strasser variations of it, it's, it absolutely is corporatism. But then if you look at like the National Bolshevik variations of it, it looks more like a British Guild socialism. Right yeah.
Varn:And what I'm talking about. When I talk about the George's, I think we're like 50, 60 years before that yeah, yeah. But these are the weird O'Neill Kantian state economic theorist people, and that's who Marx Marx knew about them, like he called them names. So anyway, another historical tangent we should have. We should have like we. I guess we should have called this show no Royal Road, because we don't stay on one.
Chris:We could just call it Road Road, no road, no road.
Jason:No road, no road, no road.
Varn:The road less taken because we just ramble around. So yeah, but anyway, thank you. Thank you, listeners. I hope our regrettable century peeps enjoy this, I hope our barnbog peeps enjoy this and we will be doing some more coast streams and aren't no road in the future. I think we're going to do at least one, if not a couple, episodes on what we mean and don't mean about revolutionary pessimism as opposed to like as opposed to like misanthropy, which I am anti misanthrop.
Varn:I know people don't realize that because I yell at people a lot, because I hate them.
Chris:Oh, we yell at the any kind of misanthropic feelings that I feel are like Fraternal. You know they're against other people on the left and they're not misanthropic, they're just extreme disappointment.
Varn:I like to remind people there, there's a book on empathy that I think people should read, which is like the problems with empathy, and it's like, yeah, empathy will eventually make you a douchebag, because occasionally, with fraternal feeling, you eventually become like why can't you get this right? You're like me, and that is actually an empathetic response, whereas the methamphetope either just hates you or like as a total nihilist, you don't even know he hates you because he doesn't care enough to make it know so, but we'll talk about that. So you have that to look forward to, and our long march through class conflict and the crisis of feudalism by Rodney Hilton. And if you can find it, go look it up and with that,
