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Rather than become involved in an extensive debate on what precisely constitutes a mode of production, in my classes this term is used in the sense of a heuristic device very roughly corresponding to a “socioeconomic system” but which also incorporates the political system. [1]
Rather than become involved in an extensive debate on what precisely constitutes a mode of production, in my classes this term is used in the sense of a heuristic device very roughly corresponding to a “socioeconomic system” but which also incorporates the political system. [1]
[1]. See Benton (1984) and Rigby (1987) for a succinct summary of the debate about the concept.
[1]. See Benton (1984) and Rigby (1987) for a succinct summary of the debate about the concept.
NOTES
NOTES
[1]. From page 1065 of her article that was published in the American Historical Review, 79, No. 4 (1974), pp. 1063-1088. More recently, another historian, Susan Reynolds, helped to complete the project started by Brown with the publication of her monumental work: Fiefs and Vassals: the Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford University Press, 1994)—she, in fact, not only indicates that her book was inspired by Brown’s article, but she dedicates it to Brown. In this painstakingly researched work she lays to rest the inaccurate model of medieval European society that the term feudalism has traditionally been used to describe. Note that she makes a clear distinction between feudalism as used by traditional historians, which is her primary concern, and that used to describe a particular mode of production; as she points out: “I have deliberately omitted almost all of the vast and important subject of relations between lords and peasants—in other words the whole subject of feudalism in its Marxist sense. Such relations seem to be of only indirect relevance to the concepts of fiefs and vassalage [meaning feudalism traditionally defined] as they have been understood since the sixteenth century.” (p. 15)
[1]. From page 1065 of her article that was published in the American Historical Review, 79, No. 4 (1974), pp. 1063-1088. More recently, another historian, Susan Reynolds, helped to complete the project started by Brown with the publication of her monumental work: Fiefs and Vassals: the Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford University Press, 1994)—she, in fact, not only indicates that her book was inspired by Brown’s article, but she dedicates it to Brown. In this painstakingly researched work she lays to rest the inaccurate model of medieval European society that the term feudalism has traditionally been used to describe. Note that she makes a clear distinction between feudalism as used by traditional historians, which is her primary concern, and that used to describe a particular mode of production; as she points out: “I have deliberately omitted almost all of the vast and important subject of relations between lords and peasants—in other words the whole subject of feudalism in its Marxist sense. Such relations seem to be of only indirect relevance to the concepts of fiefs and vassalage [meaning feudalism traditionally defined] as they have been understood since the sixteenth century.” (p. 15)
[2]. I cannot resist repeating here, for the umpteenth time, that strange as it may appear to many of you, capitalism, as the dominant mode of production in which the pursuit of profit-driven limitless accumulation of wealth for its own sake by a tiny minority, on the basis of its monopolistic ownership and/or control of the means of production, as well as the coercive means to enforce it, entails for the majority the complete surrender of their time and labor to the capitalist class against the backdrop of pauperization as a permanent feature of capitalism, is a relatively new human invention (and not a dispensation from God).
[2]. I cannot resist repeating here, for the umpteenth time, that strange as it may appear to many of you, capitalism, as the dominant mode of production in which the pursuit of profit-driven limitless accumulation of wealth for its own sake by a tiny minority, on the basis of its monopolistic ownership and/or control of the means of production, as well as the coercive means to enforce it, entails for the majority the complete surrender of their time and labor to the capitalist class against the backdrop of pauperization as a permanent feature of capitalism, is a relatively new human invention (and not a dispensation from God).
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