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Date: Sun, 14 Feb 93 15:25:55 EST
From: "Daniel A. Foss" <
[email protected]>
Subject: class war it both ends of Eurasia
To: Chris Chase-Dunn <CHRISCD@JHUVM>
[Imagine you are Charles Tilly, you come to Stony Brook in 1991 to Colloq to
the Soc Dept, and give a stemwinding peroration re urgency of solving the Where
Went China Problem, and afterward some obvious case of mental retardation, from
Undrugged state, shuffles up, mumbling, "I did." "Send me a copy." Charles
Tilly has got too much junkmail already. I'm sending YOU the copy, in
installments.]
*Comparative social revolution in the fourteenth century*
Proletarian insurrection in European industrial towns, notably Ghent
and Florence, were major historical events. (That is, they "made the
grade" into the prestigious *l'histoire evenementelle*; were not consigned
to the ghettos of *l'histoire structurelle* or *l'histoire de la vie
quotidienne*.) These are contrasted to industrial cities where class
struggles were rarely more intense than limited squabbles over the
working day but likewise precipitated by the plague.[n] The Ghent
laborers' appreciation of their own scarcity had run into the governing
industrialists' determination to fix wages at pre-Plague or otherwise
very low levels; and they rose against the employers in 1376 under James
van Artevelde, son of Peter. In Florence, tens of thousands of
proletarians, the *Ciompi*,[n+1] laboring under horrible conditions in large
establishments built to cut costs, and excluded from membership in the
powerful cloth guild (*Arte di Lana*), managed to organize independently
and in 1378 nearly succeeded in what might have been the first working-
class revolution.[n+2]
----------------------
[n] In David Landes, Revolution In Time, 1982, we are told of labor
disputes over the actual settings of the municipal clock, a device
indtroduced in this period and a source of municipal pride. The state
was as ever class-biased in starting the day early and ending it late.
[n+1] From the clomp! noise made by their wooden shoes.
[n+2} "The only way the Florentine textile manufacturer could increase
his margin of profit was by lowering the wages of his workmen. He had no
control over the price of the raw material he bought from the importers,
who were the merchant bankers, and no control either over the market
price of the cloth, which was fixed by the authorities. The cost of
labor amounted to 60 percent of the cost of the finished product. The
workmen could not appeal any decision relating to their wages. They
had no rights. The inspectors who came to visit them regularly did not
do so to listen to complaints, but to check on any breach in the
regulations. The guilds had their own police officers and their own
jails for dealing with any recalcitrant workers. The textile industry
was thus run methodically and efficiently - but only for the benefit
of the businessmen, a tiny minority who formed only 2 percent of the
population, or 5 to 10 percent if one includes all the members of
their families." (Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial
Revolution of the Middle Ages, 1976, p. 105)
----------------------
Still more dramatic upheaval occurred as peasants rose in revolt
across Europe: Dissatisfaction over labor conditions was mingled with
protest against the burden of taxation, regional rebellion, fury at
misgovernment, and anticlericalism or religious heterodoxy. The French
*jacqueries* erupted in 1358. In England, the Peasant War of 1381 was
provoked by Parliament's enactment of the poll tax in 1377; and the
rebels drew on radical-egalitarian adaptations of the teachings of John
Wyclif. Also in 1381 the Swiss Canons successfully resisted the last
efforts of their former Habsburg overlords to reduce them to obedience.
Of all the peasant insurrections the most sustained and most
programatically revolutionary, the Hussite Wars in Bohemia (1419 to 1433)
had not initially involved the peasants, though the revolutionary army's
strength derived from its use of peasant infantry and the doctrines
preached from the egalitarian peasant utopia named after the Biblical
Mount Tabor. All these revolts, insurrections, and revolutionary movements
were crushed with massive bloodshed, with the sole exception of the
inaccessible Swiss mountaineers. This is much in keeping with the
unrelieved succession of defeated slave or peasant revolts in Europe
throughout recorded history.
Much of the social conflict in post-1350 Europe reflected the anger
at blocked opportunities, status incongruities, burdensome archaic
survivals, and overweening elite pretensions, all of which had been
rendered ideologically naked by the erosion of the prestige of the
Church and its teachings. The latter in turn reflected the failure
of religious magic to be of any avail against the pestilence.
Local famine in Europe might be the limited result of military
predation, but the economy was too primitive for dislocation to cause
absolute deprivation among those who on the whole consumed what they
produced and had frequently improved their access to the means of
producing what they consumed.
*Post-plague revolution in China*.
Those who in modern times have studied or theorized about the Chinese
Revolution which culminated in the founding of the People's Republic in
1949 have mostly ignored the rich tradition of Chinese peasant wars. I
am arguing here essentially that in China another variable, a tradition
of peasant uprisings, had an interaction effect with the results of the
Plague. Not long after the First Emperor of Qin had unified the Empire
(221 BC), his successor was overthrown by a peasant-based army led by
the peasant-born Liu Bang (initial uprising to fall of Xianyang, 210-107;
civil war with aristocratic general Xiang Yu, 207-202; Han foundation,
202). Subsequent dynasties were overthrown by peasant war or at least
shaken to their foundations; three recognized dynasties including the
Han, Later Liang, and Ming were founded by men born peasants. Whether
the perduring vulnerability of the Chinese state derives from structural
macrosocial (or geographic-demographic) causes, or merely from Liu Bang's
example, revolution has long been a viable last resort for peasants and
anticipation and prevention of revolution have been major preoccupations
of the state for at least as long. Revolutions might begin with an
initial phase of spontaneous violent uprising, like the "Peasant Movement
in Hunan" in Mao's famous 1927 report; often this was initiated by a
millenarian sect. The second phase entailed the painstaking organization
for protracted war of disciplined peasant armies sensitive to peasant
susceptibilities; such was the Communist army during 1931-1949.
The Mongols appeared in North China in 1215 and by 1234 had completed
the conquest of the state formerly ruled by another barbarian people, under
the dynastic name Jin. The Mongol ruler Khubilai proclaimed a new
Chinese-style dynastic name, the Yuan, in 1260, and set about the conquest
of the Southern Song state which still ruled the economic core of China,
the Yangzi Valley. In a war of firepower and naval technology Chinese
engineering in Mongol service (assisted by two Arabs in casting the
heaviest artillery to that time but the science was Chinese) outmatched
its Southern Chinese counterpart: The Mongols ruled all China by 1279.
Rule by alien conquerors is never popular. The Mongols and their
steppe-nomad tribal allies, legally privileged castes, never amounted
to more than 3% of the population. Knowing that the Mongols were to be
driven out in one of history's most spectacular popular revolutions,
however, we may look for signs of impending doom a little too early.
There is hence a case to be made that from 1323 the Mongols had been
politically unstable; the first revolt against them came in 1325.
Such troubles were however routine; the Mongols meanwhile had a
highly important negative factor in their favor. This was the total
incompetence of the preceding Song regime to defend first North China
and finally its refuge in the South against barbarians from the steppes.
Immense resources in population and wealth could not be mobilized for
vigorous defense against numerically insignificant enemies to whom the
Song had nearly always paid tribute; and when this failed and war was
ineluctable the Song were nearly always beaten.
The Mongol state appears to have suddenly collapsed in the early 1350s
with the disintegration of its tax base in the 1340s, noted above. Where
European peasants suddenly found their labor a scarce resource over which
landlords with vacant holdings competed, the Chinese peasants on the great
estates of the Yangzi Vakkey were suddenly reduced to famine and
destitution. The estates and even small family farms produced cash crops
for sale in the vast cities of the Yangzi Delta and lesser commercial
zones; and those specializing in non-food crops purchased their staple
grain, rice, in the market.
As the urban markets for rice shrank, so did the incomes of landlords
and their ability to buy grain on the market for their servile dependents.
As we have seen, cultivation of fiber cash crops appears to have fallen
to the point that deliberate coercive state action was required to
resuscitate it after 1368. Also, unlike European cereal crops, wet rice
agriculture could not be readily expanded as the cultivable area devoted
to fibers declined: Rice is most efficiently cultivated in small family-
operated units where the cultivators know every inch of the plot. Units
gone out of production whose cultivators died were not immediately
restarted and survivors were set loose as beggars: This was the fate of
the rebel Zhu Yuanzhzng when the plague hit the Huai River Valley in
1346.
Rural families who had formerly made a living producing salt for the
state salt monopoly found their livelihood destroyed as the state as
noted could not unload immense stocks of salt upon a depleted and
economically disrupted population. Salt workers, tied to their occupations,
tried to escape or starved. Salt could not be sold to the merchants who
normally bought it whether legally or illegally: Even salt-smugglers had
to find other work. One of these was Zhang Shicheng whose revolt at Gaoyu
1353-1355, was the pivotal event in the self-destruction of the central
power.
In 1351-1352 there were epidemics with high mortality among the
population over large areas of North and East China; and the Yellow
River burst its dikes (as it did in 1947). In the same years the Chinese
peasants rose against the state under the guidance of the White Lotus
Society. This sect awaited the apocalyptic "advent of the future Buddha
Maitreya"; sought expulsion or death of rich and Mongols (and indeed
killed many); wore "Red Turbans" whereby they have since been known,
bore red banners, and called their forces "Red Armies" (pure coincidence).
The revolt broke out in the plague-disrupted Huai River Valley, where
peasants were recruited for labor on the water-conservancy scheme, in
plague-ridden Shandong, of the Mongol strongman Toghto; and escaped
immediate defeat as the plague crippled government forces. The
rebellion spread to the Yangzi Valley, Taiping country exactly six
centuries later.
With pro- and anti-Mongol gentry united against them the spontaneous
rebels gave way to the next phase. In 1355 Zhu Yuanzhang, a young peasant
left destitute when the 1346 epidemic wiped out his family, succeeded to
command of a disciplined peasant force. Though he had gained his experience
as a rebel among the Red Turbans he now disavowed and denounced their class
hatreds. Having led his hungry army to the seizure of the Yangzi city of
Caishi, he began winning support of prominent gentry. Of these he espoused
the position of a coterie of intellectuals, Zhedong, after the name of the
administrative Circuit, who had turned the negative argument for the
Mongols' regime - their capacity to furnish a militarily powerful state
by contrast to their Song predecessors - against it, accusing the Yuan
of "laxity" and "leniency."
--------------------------
[n+4] Recent developments in Anglophone electoral politics suggests that
if you run against "permissiveness" you cannot lose, even in a "public"
of abandoned hedonists. Your opponent may of course up the stakes by
for universal sacrifice, food from the starving, cold from the Homeless,
clothing from the naked, money from the impecunious. That worked, too.
--------------------------
Here, keeping to the *point*, which is which is the decline in demand
among elites and subelites for manufactured goods, I should list as
*secondary consequences* the depletion of the mumbers and wealth of the
pre-existing elites and sub-elites form agrarian insurrection and
misfortunes of war.
As a warlord among warlords Zhu Yuanzhang promised his new friends
intensified law and order, the reinforcement of hierarchical relations
in contrast to the "lax," "lenient," and corrupt ways of the Mongol Yuan
dynasty. But he still offered social reform to his peasant base: "the
Ming...had come to power on a platform of land to the tiller."[22] He
delivered on debts to both sides as anticipated by neither.
-------------------------
[22] William T. Rowe, "Modern Chinese Social History in Comparative
Perspective," in Paul S. Ropp (Ed.), Heritage of China: Contemporary
Perspectives on Chinese Civilization, Berkeley CA: Univeristy of California
Press, 1990, p. 248.
-------------------------
As Taizu, founder of the Ming dynasty, he *did* distribute land to
forcibly migrated peasants resettled on abandoned or newly reclaimed land;
but actually transferred a great deal of manorial property to his family
and other privileged characters; while on it preserving serfdom. (It was
mentioned in a previous installment that out-and-out chattel slavery was
abolished.) "The Ming code of 1397 specifically restricted the right to
command bondservants to the imperial family and members of the examination
gentry."[23] According to Eberhard, "His first laws were directed against
the rich."[24] Some landed estates *may* have been "redistributed among
poor peasants."[25] The great estates worked by tenant-serfs hardly
disappeared: Scholars flatly contradict each other as to which size unit
was predominant with, e.g., Elvin emphasizing the great estates while,
e.g., Ray Huang[26] holds that "the whole country was packed with small
cultivators." As for his promises to the gentry, he indeed established
an authoritarian autocratic regime whose centralization and arbitrary
power would remain unmatched in Europe for centuries. Thus he abolished
the freedom of speech hitherto allowed the gentry themselves, whether
as individual office-holders or collectively, as "public opinion." (This
writer calls upon The Right Honourable Member for the New Left, Sir Perry
Anderson, and if he hasn't been knighted by nw, how come, to explain
wherein the pedigree of the Ming autocracy was inadequate for consideration
in Lineages of the Absolutist State. It's nothing racial, we trust.
As Emperor, Ming Taizu may not have intended to destroy the ruling class
*as a class*. But he did destroy very many member of it as people, who died
in very large numbers with their property seized. Ray Huang lists the usual
types of victims of what he calls the "reign of terror." Quite clearly
these, especially "officials," "bureaucrats," "landlords" embrace the the
ruling class at both its highest and lowest levels. (Taizu is said to have
kept ready to hand a list of the largest landowners in China.)
Responding to an emergency situation of economic collapse, Ming Taizu
resorted to extraeconomic coercion: regimentation of the masses;
surveillance of the rich; conscription of labor; state requisitioning;
and even state ownership of industries. This was criticized at the time,
increasingly circuitously.
In the present context, as *tertiary consequences*, the massacre of
a sizable portion of the remaining large consumers of high quality
industrial and artisanal craft goods contributed to reducing demand for
output of the manufacturing sector. We may surmise from more recent
historical experience that, to the extent state intervention in the
economy appeared unnatural, unprecedented, unworkable, uneconomic, or
unwarranted it would be *opposed*; and if *opposed* then the opposition
in turn became in turn the *object of terror*. To the extent that the
political terror had the suggested economic effects it must have seemed
to require further state intervention! So thoroughly had demand collapsed
and resources been stretched that Taizu, to repeat, resorted to
distinctions of hereditary occupational status. The crowning irony was
that the single most important grievance shared by all Chinese against
the Mongols had been their restrictions, distinctions, and prohibitions
according to hereditary status based on invented ethnic distinctions.[28]
*Conclusion*:
[Stop! This thing is too long already, and I *refuse* to give away how it
ends until I find out what the addressee, CHRISCD@JHUVM, does with it. The
foregoing, recall, is excerpted from a longer essay, "Catastrophe and
Capitalism," the only extant, now lost, hardcopy whereof in most final form
it ever reached was sent to Sociolotical Theory, which six moths later,
minimum, sent a letter back, "revise and resubmit." Which more than sufficed
tor obliviation: Was boring as could be got; officially lousy scholarship say
real experts. One real expert, that's what took the six months. How much more
boring, with how much greater Drug consumption, I won't think about. Or didn't
until a dwindling number of Real Faculty said, "Send it in or we take it proof
positive you do NOTHING ans stay high as a kite doing it. If the floppidisk
got stolen, as you say, type it back in!" "For what stupid reason, being
devoid of motive, should I do that?" THIS, dear listmembership, is that stupid
reason.]
Daniel A. Foss
<<One footnotes with cited source is exclusively a device to ascertain whether
this took up too much lineage. It did.>>
