Tiêu đề Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism.doc ✅

This definition describes feudalism as an economic system in which serfdom is the predominant relation of production, and in which production is organized in and around the manorial estate of the lord. This implies that markets are for the most part local and that long- distance trade while not necessarily absent, plays no determining role in the purposes or methods of production. Therefore for Dobb, feudalism is a system of production for use. According to Dobb, the claim that the impact of commerce as an external force that finally overwhelms the stable internal economy is not a sufficient argument. He finds that there is as much evidence that the growth of money economy per se led to an intensification of serfdom as there is evidence that it was the cause of the feudal decline. One of the examples he brings forth to support this is the “second serfdom” of eastern Europe in which there was a revival of the old system associated with the growth of production for the market. On the basis of this, Dobb argues that if the only factor at work in western Europe had been the rise of trade, the result might as well have been an intensification as a disintegration of feudalism. Therefore, he reasons that the system must be looked at internally to find the cause/mover of feudalism. The essential cause of the breakdown of feudalism was the over-exploitation of the labour force: serfs deserted the lords’ estates en masse, and those who remained were too few and too overworked to enable the system to maintain itself on the old basis. It was these developments, according to Dobb, and not the rise of trade, which forced the ruling class to adopt “capitalist” expedients which finally led to the transformation of productive relations in the countryside. He stresses in a later rebuttal to his critic Paul Sweezy that he is not suggesting that class struggle of peasants against lords gives rise, in any simple and direct way, to capitalism. What it does is to modify the dependence of the petty mode of production upon feudal overlordship and eventually to shake loose the small producer from feudal exploitation.