Date:         Sun, 14 Feb 93 15:25:55 EST
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@ccvm.sunysb.edu>
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.>>