Robert Kurz - The destructive origins of capitalism: Role of the 'military revolution' in 16th century Europe
There are innumerable
versions of the birth of the modern era. Historians do not even agree about the
date of this event. Some make modernity begin in the 15th and 16th centuries,
with the so-called Renaissance (a concept invented in the 19th century by Jules
Michelet, as the French historian Lucien Lefevre has shown). Others see the
real rupture, modernity’s launching point, in the 18th century, when the
philosophy of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the beginnings of
industrialization shook the planet. But whatever date historians and modern
philosophers prefer for the beginning of their own world, they agree on one
point: its positive conquests are almost always taken as its original impulses.
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The artistic and
scientific innovations of the Italian Renaissance are considered to be just as
important for the rise of modernity as Columbus’s great voyages of discovery,
the Protestant and Calvinist idea of specific individual responsibility, the
enlightenment liberation from irrational beliefs and the rise of modern
democracy in France and the United States. In the technological-industrial
field, the invention of the steam engine and the mechanical loom are recorded
as the “starting guns” for modern social development.
This last explanation
was emphasized above all by Marxism, due to the fact that it was in harmony
with the philosophical doctrine of “historical materialism”. The true motor of
history, according to this doctrine, is the development of the material “forces
of production”, which repeatedly enter into conflict with the “relations of
production” which have become too constraining and demand a new form of
society. The leap into industrialization is thus the decisive point for
Marxism: the steam engine, according to this simplified formula, was the first
machine to break with the “current of the old feudal relations of production”.
At this point a
lamentable contradiction in the Marxist argument arises. Thus, in the famous
chapter on the “primitive accumulation of capital”, Marx occupied himself in
his magnum opus with periods that predate the steam engine by centuries. Is
this not a self-refutation of “historical materialism”? If “primitive
accumulation” and the steam engine are to be found historically separated from
one another, the productive forces of industry could not have been the decisive
cause of the birth of modern capitalism. It is true that the capitalist mode of
production was only definitively pushed forward by the industrialization of the
19th century, but, if we look for the roots of this development, we have to dig
deeper.
It is also logical
that the first seed of modernity, or the “big bang” of its dynamic, would have
to arise in a largely pre-modern environment, since otherwise there could not
have been an “origin” in the strict sense of the word. Thus, the very precocious
“first cause” and the very late “full consolidation” do not represent a
contradiction. If it is also true that for many regions of the world and for
many social groups the beginning of modernization was delayed until the present
day, it is equally certain that the very first impulse must have occurred in a
remote past, when we consider the enormous temporal expanse (from the
perspective of the lifetime of a generation or even of an isolated person) of
social processes.
What was ultimately
new, in a relatively distant past, which inevitably set the history of
modernization into motion? One can fully concede to historical materialism that
the greatest and principle point of relevance does not correspond to a simple
change of ideas and mentalities, but to the full development of material and
concrete facts. It was not, however, productive force, but on the contrary a
resounding destructive force which opened up the road to modernization, that
is, the invention of firearms. Although this correlation is much older than is
generally recognized, the most celebrated and influential theories of
modernization (including Marxism) always underestimated it.
It was the German
economic historian Werner Sombart who, shortly before the First World War, in
his study War and Capitalism (1913), subjected this question
to an in-depth and detailed examination. Only in the last few years have the
technological-military and war-economy origins of capitalism been widely
discussed, as for example in the book Cannons and Plague (1989)
by the German economist Karl Georg Zinn, or in the work The Military
Revolution (1990) by the American historian Geoffrey Parker. But neither of
these investigations found the reception they deserved. Tvidently, the modern
western world and its ideologues will only grudgingly accept the view that the
ultimate historical foundation of their sacred concepts of “freedom” and
“progress” must be sought in the invention of the diabolical death-dealing
instruments of human history. And this relation also applies to modern
democracy, since the “military revolution” remains to this day a secret motive
for modernization. The atomic bomb was itself a democratic invention of the
West.
The invention of
firearms destroyed the pre-capitalist forms of rule, since it made the feudal
cavalry militarily derisory. Even before the invention of firearms the social
consequences of long-range weapons were anticipated; thus, the Second Lateran
Council, in 1139, prohibited the use of the crossbow against Christians. Not
by chance, the crossbow, imported from non-European cultures to Europe, was
until the year 1000 considered to be the weapon of choice for bandits, outlaws
and rebels. When the much more effective cannons came into use, the destiny of
mounted and armored armies was sealed.
The firearm, however,
unlike the crossbow, was no longer in the hands of an opposition “from below”
which confronted feudal rule, but rather brought about a revolution “from
above” with the help of princes and kings. The production and mobilization of
the new weapons systems were not possible on the basis of local and
decentralized structures, such as had until then characterized social reproduction, but demanded a completely new organization of society on various
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Colloquium: The Disappearing Present: Reflections on Ideology - October 16, 2020
