Feudalism or seigneurial regime: mode of production based on the "seigneurial relation". The ruling class takes charge, on a family basis, of the exploitation of a territory and its inhabitants by virtue of a vow or pledge of vassalage which also orders and ranks the relations between the different layers and groups of the exploiting class.
General features
Spread at different historical moments across Asia, large parts of Africa and Europe, and projected towards America by the conquest of the Iberian monarchies, feudalism is not a universally homogeneous mode of production. In fact the diversity and particularity of customs and "privileges" in small territorial portions is a fundamental element of its stability, as it blocks or at least hinders commodification and trade.
However, there are a number of common features:
- Exploitation takes place by fundamentally extra-economic means and takes the form of exactions of produce and/or hours of labor.
- The exploiting class (the nobility) has no legal ownership over the exploited class, even though the peasants are bound to the territory to which they "belong."
- Practically the entirety of both labor power and the principal means of production, land, are not commodities.
- Class differences are extremely marked and, in urban space, minutely regulated and demarcated.
Classes under feudalism
The fundamental classes of feudal society were the nobility (exploiting class) and the peasantry (exploited class).
In a system with very low land productivity and a very marked difference in the capacity to satisfy the most basic needs, the size of the ruling class tended to increase much more rapidly than that of those it exploited. That is why, in practically every expression of the feudal mode of production, the ruling class developed a clergy and monastic systems - from Christianity to Buddhism by way of Islam - which served as ideological factory, colonizing agent and repository of the ruling class.
The peasantry will prove, despite the continuous revolts that will proliferate during feudal decadence, incapable of asserting a historical alternative, a role reserved for the bourgeoisie. Its program in all cases, up to the establishment of capitalism, was reduced to the defense of communal lands under various banners, nearly always with apocalyptic overtones, from the German peasants in the 16th century to the Taiping and Donghak rebellions in the 19th.
Extremely regulated and repressed in Asia, only in Europe and from the 11th century onwards was the bourgeoisie able to develop sufficiently to assert itself as a revolutionary class. And even so, between its first attempts at political revolution (Castile in 1520, Flanders in 1568, England 1642) and its first lasting successes (US independence 1776, French Revolution 1789) more than two and a half centuries went by.
Alongside these three main classes there coexisted, in different contexts, both wage laborers and slaves. Either could become numerically and economically relevant at a local level without ever amounting to a historical alternative or threatening feudalism as such.
The feudal state
Until the decadence of the system, the nobility exercised state and governmental functions locally and directly. The nobles were "lords of lives and estates". Hence the decentralized character of feudalism is usually emphasized. Although, once again, this decentralization was not homogeneous even within Europe, still less in the Arabic-speaking world, and both the monarchy and the clergy would at different times try to reorganize and centralize the ruling class.
In reality, it was not until feudalism entered its decadence that the main European monarchies (Castile, England, France) and the Ottoman sultanate laid the foundations of a true "state feudalism", later known as the "Ancien Régime".
It is then that feudalism develops a state that is relatively voluminous and autonomous from the individual nobles. The "private wars" between noble families die out. The first systems of criminal investigation (the Inquisition) and the first centralized judicial and police bodies (royal commanders and bailiffs) appear. And a whole bureaucracy flourishes around the court and gradually takes on functions across the territory.
In the course of feudal decadence, and especially from the 16th century onwards in Europe, this state will become a battleground and a point of fusion between the nobility and the rising bourgeoisie. The equilibrium will come in the terminal phases of the Ancien Régime, preparing and foreshadowing the seizure of the state apparatus by the bourgeoisie.
By way of exception, there are periods in which the warring classes are so evenly balanced that the power of the State, as apparent mediator, acquires for the moment a certain independence from both. Such is the case of the absolute monarchy of the 17th and 18th centuries, which held the balance between the nobility and the bourgeoisie.
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels, 1884