Last year, I wrote an editorial on P2P and the feudal transition. It’s main thesis was that if we want to understand the transition from the current system to one that is dominated by the peer to peer logic, it is best not to look at the feudal to capitalist transition, characterized by many political revolutions and civil wars, and especially not on the expected transition by the Marxist transition, predicated on a taking of power in the state first, as a means of changing society ‘afterwards’. On the contrary, we may look at how the Roman slave mode of production changed into the feudal synthesis, partly because a mutual reorientation of both the producing farmer classes, and the slave owners. In short, slaves become coloni and then serfts, because slavery no longer worked, and many slave owners ‘liberated’ their slaves into coloni. An analogy in my view was the shift from extensive development (in space, through the conquest of more land to obtain slaves from), to intensive agricultural development, combined with the intellectual and spiritual globalization by the christian Church, which allowed innovations to travel from region to region. Similarly, the resource crisis may provoke a return to more localized production (enabled by desktop, agile, digital, and multimachine fabrication methods), coupled with global open design communities, and similarly a result of a reorientation of both producing and ‘ruling’ classes.

It is this thesis that Raoul Victor addresses on the Oekonux mailing list, and I will respond to it later in a separate posting.

He writes:

“When one tries to understand the decline of the Roman Empire, it is most important (IMHO) to take into account that “slavery” was not the only system of production in the Empire. People involved directly in slavery, masters and slaves, were certainly in minority, even if slavery was the *dominant* system. This “overlapping” or coexistence of different systems around a dominant system was also the case for Feudalism (as David Laibman notes it) and is still the case for capitalism, even today. The *dominant system* (a crucial Marxist concept, that Graham seems to underestimate – as you tell him in your mail of 9jan08) lives in a more or less developed symbiosis with the other systems. In that sense, nevertheless, I agree with Graham when he says: “What happens to a society does not depend *only* on internal tendencies within the dominant mode of production [my underlying]” (9jan09;13:04). In the case of the Roman Empire, Rome, the center lived partially on the plundering of its colonies whose agriculture was often based on more productive relations of production (communal agriculture under despotism, like in Egypt and Middle East) than slavery. (This is probably one of the factors explaining that the Eastern Roman Empire survived 10 centuries longer than the Western… ). The low productivity of the Roman agriculture was not a big problem as far as the colonies could help to feed the center of the empire, but things changed as the maintaining of the empire became more costly and difficult. The emancipation of the slaves and their transformation into “coloni”, the “first serves”, allowing a more intensive care of agriculture, was an answer to that situation.

So, I agree with your formulation: >Feudalism arose because failing extensive development, led to a >quest for intensive development, i.e. more productivity

I agree with you that the overcoming of capitalism limits “is going to happen in a similar way than the slavery to feudal transition, by a transformation of the fundamental logic of the whole system”, even if in the past this was not specific to the slavery-feudalism transition. It was the same for feudalism to capitalism transition.

I also agree with you that capitalism is a system which needs permanent expansion and that this expansion has objective limits.

But I am not sure that the ecology (or any “physical” reality) constitutes that limit. Even if certainly capitalism will leave the world as a dumping ground, it may limit the ecological consequences of its logic. Capitalism is already doing more and more business in thousand of “ecological” technologies and projects. Even the oil companies are selling their empty oil wells to store CO2! I rather think that the limit of expansion is in the lack of new markets. You say that “there are still wide areas of the world that could be more developed”. Yes, and this may give it yet some room for further expansion. But less and less. The integration of China and India, even if it is partial, is an important advance towards these limits.

What disturbs me in the parallel you draw between the two transitions is that you seem to associate the overcoming of capitalism *only* with a shift “from extensive to intensive development”, as it was the case for feudalism at least at the beginning. Of course a “peer society” will realize a gigantic “intensive” development as it implies a much better organization do deal with “knowledge” based production… among others. But, contrary to what happened with feudalism, this development has no reason to be done at the expense of “extensive” development (demographical: developing the number and share of persons integrated into the production/consumption process; geographical: cultivating, irrigating, “humanizing” desert or “non-profitable” (from a capitalistic pointy of view) regions of the planet). Many times, capitalist expansion in underdeveloped regions consists in destroying the old modes of organization by integrating only a small part of the population into direct capitalist relations and leaving the rest in a more or less marginalized and destitute situation. The capitalist limits to expansion remain very far from the minimum human needs of social integration and enjoying of social wealth. In that sense, the break with the capitalist logic allowed by peer production will lead to a real expansion of the social productive process. The development of productive forces in the post-capitalist society will be intensive but also extensive.”