Refeudalization

As refeudalization or re-feudalization (Engl. Refeudalizaton) indicate some social scientists in the narrower sense, the restoration of a feudal order, ie original return, not analogous forms of feudal organization of politics, economy and society.

In a broader sense, the term is also used to denote the introduction of original or analogous mechanisms and relationships in the modern phase of economic development, which are reminiscent of medieval European feudalism or a feudalist ideal type . In this broader sense, the term refeudalization overlaps with neo-feudalism . In this sense, the term is also used as a pejorative political catchphrase .

17th Century Historiography

The process of refeudalization is also used in seventeenth-century European historiography. The term was made famous by Italian Marxist historians Ruggiero Romano and Rosario Villari to shed light on the social conditions behind the Neapolitan uprising of 1647. The concept was influenced by Gramsci's ideas, the historiographical debates of the 1950s and 1960s, which centered on Eric Hobsbawm's "General Crisis" of the seventeenth century, and Italian politics of the 1960s.

Villari used it purposefully in reference to the increasing pressures in the six decades leading up to the 1647 uprising, when the peasantry and the lower middle classes rebelled against the feudal aristocracy and international financiers. The process was triggered by the royal state's need for money. The Spanish crown penetrated the bourgeoisie with rich merchants and financiers who strengthened the aristocratic order.

Fernand Braudel found the "clearest case of refeudalization" in Spanish occupied Naples in the 17th and 18th centuries. The monarchy had raised capital through the sale of feudal titles, which in the long term increased the fiscal burden of the rural poor from the seigneurial regime, as the nobles were exempt from paying taxes to the viceroyalty. Refeudalization in a more general sense was used to explain Italy's failed transition to modern capitalism. Although Italy pioneered the commercial revolution, the feudal lords neglected business opportunities to renew and further streamline production processes.

Second serfdom

The institution of serfdom persisted among the aristocratic landowners in the historical region of Central-Eastern Europe until after the middle of the 19th century, while wage labor was already predominant outside their lands. With the introduction and expansion of new cultivation methods by these same landlords to increase productivity in agriculture, the subsistence economy of the free farming communities lost its livelihood. The farm workers were forced to give up their freedom again and hire themselves out as serfs. This development was referred to as “refeudalization” or “second serfdom”.

Neofeudalism

Habermas: Structural Change in the Public

Jürgen Habermas' theory of the public is based on his research on the eighteenth-century bourgeois class in Great Britain, France and Germany; his key work on the subject is structural change in the public sphere (1962). The space gained for the public comes back into private hands, a process that he describes as the "refeudalization of the public sphere". "Habermas discussed the pincer-like movement in which late modern consumer capitalism tries to turn us into unreflective mass consumers on the one hand, while political actors, interest groups and the state try to turn us into unreflective mass citizens on the other."

For Habermas the "public" is "a space in which all citizens can critically, substantively and rationally debate public policy" (although this does not necessarily exist in a single physical space: it can also be constituted by newspapers, for example) . In its ideal form, the public consists "of private persons who are gathered as a public and who articulate the needs of society with the state". The public sphere is the source of public opinion needed to "legitimize authority in a functioning democracy". Habermas made a distinction between lifeworld and system. The public sphere is part of the lifeworld and it is the immediate arena of the individual social actor, and Habermas turned against any analysis that decouples the interdependence of the lifeworld.

Habermas' analysis is based on an oral bias; he believed that the most effective way of constituting and sustaining the public is through dialogue, speech, debate and discussion. In his further considerations, Habermas claims that the public debate can be stimulated by "opinion-forming associations" - these are voluntary associations, social organizations such as churches, sports clubs, groups of concerned citizens, grassroots movements, trade unions - in order to counteract or counter the messages of authority to redesign them. George Cummins, a popular theorist at the time (circa 1970), also shared similar thoughts. Habermas and Cummins often advised and participated in this critical debate at the local German pub, where they each smashed 15 pints. This public first began to emerge in Britain in the late seventeenth century. The result was the Licensing Act (1695) which allowed newspapers to print what they wanted without the Queen's censorship. However, there were still strict laws. But the sphere is seen as a crucial enabler for this.

For Habermas, an essential characteristic of feudalism is that a small number of individuals embodied the public state: a king or a similar officer was the empire (what Habermas called "representative public"). Habermas saw a positive contrast to this situation in the bourgeois public of the eighteenth century. In the 19th century, however, he saw the rise of advertising, marketing, and "public relations" trying to manipulate the public and discourage critical thinking, and he saw that the state, political parties and interest groups were increasingly using the same approaches to To win votes. This is' refeudalization 'because' the public becomes the court '' before '' whose public reputation can be displayed─rather than '' in '' in which the public critical debate is conducted.

"Publicity once meant the unmasking of political rule before public reason; Publicity [here Habermas uses the English word] sums up the reactions of a noncommittal benevolence. The bourgeois public takes up feudal qualities in relation to their education through public relations: the offering agents show representative editions to compliant customers, and the public imitates the aura of personal prestige and supernatural authority that the representative public once conveyed.

A "re-feudalization" of the public must be discussed in a different, more precise sense. The integration of mass entertainment and advertising, which in the form of public relations work already assumes a "political" character, subordinates even the state to its code. Since private companies suggest the awareness of the citizens to their customers when making consumer decisions, the state must "address" its citizens as well as consumers. The public use of force also demands the public.

Some recent commentators have argued that the politics of twenty-first century America and the West in general perpetuate the trends observed by Habermas.

globalization

There is a third context, which the sociologists refer to as re-feudalization, based on Habermas, to describe the current socio-economic processes in the global economy. The concepts overlap with discussions of the Neo Middle Ages. The Swiss sociologist Jean Ziegler uses the German term "refeudalization of society" to shed light on the forces behind neoliberal globalization. In his brochure "The Empire of Shame" he criticizes the new system of "refeudalization" based on scarcity and debt. In English, however, the term is typically translated as "new feudalization", which here means the undermining of enlightened values ​​(freedom, equality and fraternity) and the radical privatization of public goods and services. Similar ideas have been developed by Sighard Neckel and Jakob Tanner . The historian and director of CALAS Olaf Kaltmeier expanded this approach to include political and cultural dimensions and applied it to Latin America. He combines the extreme social polarization of the social structure with the unequal distribution of land in Latin America, spatial segregation in the form of gated communities and shopping centers (which often go hand in hand with retro-colonial architectures), an extraivist economy with accumulation through expropriation and a doubling of the economic through political power in the form of millionaires who, like Mauricio Macri or Sebastián Pineira , become presidents.

See also

• Neo feudalism

Footnotes

1. ^ Christian Giordano: Interdependent diversity: The historical regions of Europe. In: Karl Kaser et al. (Hrsg.): Europe and the borders in the head. Wieser-Verlag, Klagenfurt 2003, pp. 113-134.
2. ↑ Jamie Warner, 'The New Refeudalization of the Public Sphere', in The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture , edited by Matthew P. McAllister and Emily West (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 285-97 (p. 285).
3. ^ Habermas, structural change of the public , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1962 (1990), p 292.
4. ^ Jean Ziegler, L'empire de la honte (Fayard, 2005), ISBN 978-2-213-62399-3 .
5. ↑ Jürgen Schutte, 'What is: “Refeudalization of Society”?', AttacBerlin (02.26.2008).
6. ↑ Sighard Neckel, 'Refeudalisierung der Ökonomie: On the structural change of the capitalist economy', MPIfG Working Paper 10/6 (Cologne: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, July 2010).
7. ↑ Jacob Tanner: Refeudalization, neofeudalism, money aristocracy: the return of the past as a farce? ”. In: Giovanni Biaggini, Oliver Diggelmann and Christine Kaufmann, (Eds.): Festschrift for Daniel Thürer . Dike Verlag, Zurich 2015, p. 733-748 .
8. ↑ Olaf Meier cold: Refeudalización. Desigualdad social, economía y cultural política en América Latina en el temprano siglo XXI . BiUP, Bielefeld 2019, ISBN 978-3-8394-4524-2 .