Between feudal yoke and market dictation – the question of the historical meaning of work and freedom

The debate about the right economic order and the place of the working person in society runs through all of modern intellectual history like a common thread, stretching from medieval workshops to early modern manufactories to the global financial markets of the present. Anyone today who wants to understand why the question of the liberation of theLabour is at the same time a question of liberation from the domination of capital, must look back to that epoch in which the small free peasants and craftsmen still owned their tools themselves and in which labour had not yet become a mere commodity on an anonymous market. The following text attempts to trace the historical development of the medievalTracing small-scale production through the capitalist revolution to the current domination of market mechanisms, asking whether the path to modernity necessarily had to lead to the enslavement of the previously liberated workers or whether there had been another path on which technical creativity and social freedom could be combined.is not about a nostalgic transfiguration of past times, but about the clarification of a historical meaning of the idea, which seems to be almost completely buried in the current order.

The Progressive Judgment on Medieval Production

Anyone who stops at the industrial revolution of the Middle Ages and sees it as more than a mere preliminary stage of the actual great revolution is exposed to the sharp judgment of the two founders of scientific socialism, who believe in progress. However, the consideration pursued here was not about finding a way out of the contemporary contradiction between politicalTo pave the way for equality and economic servitude, but rather to clarify a historical meaning of the idea as far as possible. Having said that, we return to Friedrich Engels’ remarks on the pre-industrial world. Engels describes the period before capitalist production, i.e. the Middle Ages, as an epoch of general small business based on thePrivate property of the workers in their means of production. This included the agriculture of small, free or subservient farmers as well as the craftsmanship of the cities.

The work equipment, i.e. land, agricultural equipment, workshop and hand tools, were work equipment of the individual, calculated only for individual use and therefore necessarily petty, dwarfish and limited. But that is precisely why they also belongedusually the manufacturer himself. According to Engels, bundling and expanding these fragmented, narrow means of production and transforming them into the powerful levers of current production was the historical role of the capitalist mode of production and its carrier, the bourgeoisie. As the bourgeoisie has done since the end of the Middle Ages on the three levels of the simpleCooperation, which the manufactory and large industry have historically carried out, was described in detail by Karl Marx in his main economic work. From the early modern era, the historical role of the capitalist mode of production would have been to revolutionize the artisanal mode of production.

The price of revolutionization: the enslavement of the ploughmen

The only problem is that the price of this revolution was the massive enslavement of the ploughmen, those peasants and craftsmen who had previously freed themselves from the feudal yoke with great effort. Therefore, the following question now arises: Was the capitalist enslavement of the peasants and craftsmen a historical necessity in the sense that the development of transforming knowledgerequired a modernization of the production apparatus, which in turn would have required the proletarianization of the plowmen? When Engels writes with regard to ancient Greece that, given the historical preconditions of the ancient world, especially the Greek world, progress towards a society based on class antagonisms could only take place in the form of slavery,then a disturbing continuation of this idea comes to mind. Is it then to be understood that the march towards a classless society should also have taken place in the form of slavery?

Or, on the contrary, does it mean that the distinguishing feature of a society based on class antagonism is precisely that theDevelop productive forces within it in a more or less disguised form of slavery? This question is by no means merely academic in nature, because it touches on the core of what holds each economic order together at its core and what destroys it at its core. The answer that one gives to this question determines decisively whether one considers the current order as an inevitable fateor whether you can see in it a changeable, man-made facility that can also be remodeled by people.

The path to bondage and the two ways of coordination

When the Austrian-British economic thinker Friedrich August Hayek wrote his much-noticed polemic on the path to slavery in London during the Great War, he thought he already knew the answer: Only the path to communism would certainly lead to a form of slavery. Two decades later, the American economic thinker Milton Friedman neededonly to follow in his footsteps to formulate a similar thesis. According to Friedman, there are basically only two ways to coordinate the economic activities of millions of people. One type is centrally controlled, working with the help of coercive measures, i.e. with techniques such as those used by armies and totalitarian states. The second typeis the voluntarily controlled, i.e. the interaction of individual people, as can be experienced in any marketplace.

According to Friedman, the possibility of voting by voluntary cooperation is based on the basic, admittedly often denied prerequisite that both sides of an economic transaction benefit from it, provided that the transaction takes place on bothPages voluntarily and in full knowledge of what is happening. Friedman thus describes a variety of exchange based on reciprocity and mutual understanding, an exchange whose driving force favours technical and social innovations. In contrast, the pursuit of central control would refer back to the feudal lord, whoof all means of production and reserves all means of exchange, striving to stifle a living, popularly supported market economy. This juxtaposition seems at first glance plausible and captivating in its simplicity.

The historical reality behind liberal theory

However, if one knows that the emergence of a modern international market based on the exchange of goods had historically mainly taken the form of the transatlantic slave trade, which guaranteed a voluntary and mutually beneficial transaction for slave buyers and slave sellers, then one suspects that it was the prose of the liberalEconomic thinkers need critical distance. However, it is best not to gain this distance by denying his explanations any theoretical validity. Rather, in the wake of the French researcher Grégoire Chamayou, it is important to examine the forms of the historical practice of Friedman’s capitalism and thus to establish a history of the authoritarianTo bring liberalism to light. Viewed in this light, the capitalist critique of the army and the state expresses nothing other than a rather natural claim made by the possessing classes: the claim to the monopoly of force.

The believer in progress will therefore refer less to the writings of Milton Friedman, but rather to the statements of theecuadorian statesman Rafael Correa, who saw humanity’s most important challenge at the beginning of the present century as being to free itself from the yoke of capital and its most important expansion, from the illusion of the market. In other words, it must be possible to put people above capital and societies above the markets and finallyto assign the status of the servant and not that of the master. This demand for a reversal of the power relations between the market and man stands in sharp contrast to the liberal idea of a self-regulating exchange that allegedly works for the benefit of all parties involved.

The sword on the world market and the inertia of the structures

But hadn’t Engels already warned and asked where the sword was that was in charge of the world market? This question contains a bitter realization, because it implies that the world market is by no means a peaceful place of voluntary exchange, but a battlefield where the strongest power determines the rules. And if we look at the French thinker Serge Latoucheif we wanted to follow suit, our time would have already expired, because the new structures will propagate themselves from now on, solely through the action of the law of inertia and market mechanisms, leaving those involved at the mercy of an almost inevitable fate. The only changes that still seem possible from this point on are those that make the machineitself.

Does this mean that the inertia of feudal and imperial structures is followed by an even more terrible inertia, namely that of the nameless mechanisms of the market, as it were judgments of the gods, which are completely beyond the grasp of progressive social forces? Or does that mean that you should do without the sword that commands the world market,not to submit to the judgments of the gods, but to free themselves from a creative process that falls apart into two parts? This process consists in first perceiving and recognizing the model or shape of the thing to be made, so that the means can then be provided to realize what is perceived. The question of the swordon the world market is thus at the same time a question of the shape of labour itself and of who determines this shape.

The dreamed liberation and the recapture of the creative act

In other words, one is faced with the choice of whether to mourn the times in which a feudal lord dominated production by curbing the liberal forces of the market, or whether, on the contrary, one should strive for times in which the transforming reason would no longer be subordinate to the sword on the world market. This sword may now be used by a feudal lord, a prince or aTrade mechanism, which is based more on the balance of power than on exchange. The French poet Rimbaud spoke in his poetic legacy of the dreamed liberation, as if to suggest that the terribly rapid perfection of figures and deeds does not originate either from the world market or from industrial capitalism. These two powers are blunting humanityon the contrary, and leave behind those sad, staring, motionless wheels that rise from the rubble in a deeply astonishing way, that image of devastation that the American novelist Faulkner has so insistently described.

Rather, the dreamed of liberation stems from the fact that the creative technical act is recaptured socially and socially. Rimbaud callsas it were, the fertility of the spirit and the immensity of the universe, in order to conjure up a world in which work is no longer subject to the dictates of an anonymous market or the arbitrariness of a single master. In this vision, the creative power of the mind and the infinite vastness of the possible merge into a unity that can be achieved neither through feudal servitude nor throughcapitalist exploitation. The task, therefore, is to regain the fertility that fed the great stream of human and economic creativity in the Middle Ages and to defend it against any form of tyranny, be it feudal, state or market.