Get rid of "isms"
The primeval era lasted more than a million years. And all this time people were engaged in the struggle with nature. They did not have classes, exploitation of man by man, that is, one continuous well-being in terms of relations between people. Although culture has already appeared - religion, clothing, jewelry, a complex intra-tribal hierarchy ... True, in this picture from a textbook on stories for the 5th grade, they are still quite wild ...
My mouth will speak wisdom
and the meditations of my heart are knowledge.
Psalms 48:4
and the meditations of my heart are knowledge.
Psalms 48:4
Problems of historical knowledge. The discussion of the article “Three epochs and six periods in the history of knightly weapons” dated March 26, 2023 turned, as I actually expected, into an interesting discussion about what feudalism is. Moreover, VO readers showed considerable erudition, considering the question of what chivalry is as a component of the feudal era, which could not but please me. And so much so that I cannot help but cite here some of the comments that I especially remember, and I hope that their authors will not be offended by me for this. The only thing I took the liberty of correcting some of them a little, so that they would be more understandably perceived by readers.
Korsar4 (Sergey). The Knight is a European product. Although prototypes can be found in any civilization.
Paul3390 (Paul). In the XNUMXth century, there were already heavy cavalry in the east. In Europe, the knights were just pecking ...
Mihaylov (Mihaylov). By the way, why not scrape together for feudalism, say, in Mycenaean society? There is not even semi-feudalism, but quite a feudal system is obtained.
Eduard Vashchenko (Eduard). Without the death of a clan, no state will appear; nowhere in Europe do we see a fief, feud or estate appear on the basis of a clan. For a feudal lord, in addition to "chain mail", a horse and "placement", feudal dependents are also needed.
The issuance of land for service, or the right to collect income - this methodologically is not feudalism.
The knight is a unique European phenomenon: a fusion of social specificity (Christianity, external threats and the creation of a system of existence of society, feudalism) plus technology (chain mail, armor and a horse).
The presence of a cataphract or cataphract, which we observe from antiquity, is not a sign of a "knight" in its specific meaning.
3x3zsave (Anton). I would start with economics.
Let's start?
Ancient Egypt is the cradle of civilization. And what was not there. Here are some examples of temples. And workshops were assigned to them, where free Egyptians worked, not slaves, who received a salary for this. Behind the fence ... An analogue of our Soviet "sharashkas" ?! And to what formation should their work be attributed? Slavery? Feudalism? Capitalism? And ordinary Egyptians in the Old Kingdom were sent to build pyramids for three months. Our students on the collective farms worked less in autumn, but after all, there must have been at least some progress over all these millennia...
Wonderful, isn't it? True, personally, I first of all drew attention to the comments of the reader under the nickname Paul3390 (Paul), since he touched on a very interesting topic regarding the fact that chivalry as a phenomenon arose precisely in the East, and later migrated to Europe. He tried to defend his point of view convincingly, but he did not succeed too convincingly. But it did not work out, first of all, because ... well, a person is not familiar with historiography on this issue, both our Russian (and Soviet as well) and foreign.
The fact is that this issue was considered back in the era of the USSR on the pages of a very respectable publication - the journal of the Russian Academy of Sciences "Questions of History". The article was called "Eastern chivalry (in comparison with the western)", 1986, No. 10, author A. S. Yunusov. Usually, in my articles on VO, I do not resort to links to the so-called "live journals" (God alone knows what pearls can be found in them), but in this case I wanted to recommend to VO readers the most accessible source posted on the Web back in 2015, namely this very article here on this website.
I remember that this article, with its argumentation, made a strong impression on me, but in 1986 I was not yet engaged in chivalry and postponed it until better times. Apparently, he had a presentiment that I would definitely need it in the future. And these times came in 1997, when the Prosveshchenie publishing house published my first book on a knightly theme: Knights of the Middle Ages. It contained the last two chapters: "Knights of the East" and "Knights of the Indians." But it had to happen that the publishing house allowed an overrun of pages, and all the books that were being prepared for publication at that very moment were reduced by ... a certain number of pages. This is how my book, for example, lost these last two chapters and some more volume of the last remaining chapter, which is noticeable in the text.
Take a closer look at these drawings made from wall reliefs in the tombs (mastabas) of Egyptian officials. Developed production, developed economy. But where are the slaves? And they appeared only in the era of the New Kingdom
And again, everything that happens is all for the best. As a result, this chapter grew to a whole book - "Knights of the East", published by the publishing house "Pomatur" based on the layout of the publishing house "Enlightenment" in 2002.
Well, there were also several materials on VO about this. In particular, in 2017, material was published here "Knights from Shahnameh" , with beautiful illustrations and excerpts from Ferdowsi's poem, which he completed in 991, and naturally began to write much earlier.
Typical "three-quarter" armor, that is, only to the knees, belonged to Lieutenant General, Count Adolf von Schwarzenberg (1547–1600). Made around 1590 in Milan by Pompeo della Cesa. And what’s interesting is that by the time the knights appeared in such armor, the first bourgeois revolution was already raging in the Netherlands, that is, even officially feudalism was living out its last years there ... Dresden armory ward. Author's photo
It would be possible to stop at this, if not for one important circumstance.
The speech in the comments concerned not only the comparison of eastern chivalry with the western one, but also the vagueness of the wording of the very concept of feudalism. And this is what I would like to pay special attention to.
Commentator Mihaylov (Mihaylov) found it even in Crete-Mycenaean society. But all other characteristics of the five socio-economic formations known to us are also blurred. In ancient Egypt, for example, the clan perished long ago, and there was a state that owned the whole earth. And for a long time there were so few slaves that they were even called "living dead." That is, initially this potential labor force was simply killed. And what was the system in Ancient Egypt then?
Or take the US in 1861... Advanced capitalism in the North and slavery in the South. Slavery! But in the United States it was at least abolished in 1863. In Brazil - let's remember the TV series Slave Isaura, beloved in our country in the 90s - it was canceled much later, namely in 1888. That is, there was a slave system there ?!
Let's open any Russian school textbook that deals with events in Russia in the first half of the XNUMXth century. And there will be a paragraph: "The development of capitalism in Russia." But in Russia at that time there was serfdom, that is, there was feudalism. So - he developed latently?
And the speech, it turns out, is only about the percentage of this or that phenomenon. What more?! And if 50x50? Whereas? Feudal capitalism?
Entertainment tournaments of the feudal nobility took place until the end of the XNUMXth century. When the capitalist pressure finally put an end to feudalism, not only in Holland, but also in England. Dresden Armory. Author's photo
“Slaves with huts” (columns) were in slave-owning Rome, and these are the same serfs, but the Slavs also traded in slaves, and the most real ones, in the early feudal period of our history. Feudal Cedric of Saxony from Ivanhoe had a slave, Vampa, and the future Captain Blood was exiled to America as a “white slave” for participating in the Monmouth uprising, although there had long been capitalism in England at that time.
Freed Negro slaves and their white mistress Scarlet O'Hara. A frame from the film Gone with the Wind. There is slavery in the South, isn't there? But the owners of these same slaves sold their cotton on the market, entered into market relations, and the market is one of the most important signs of capitalism
That is, there are no clear characteristics for all five socio-economic formations inherited from Karl Marx!
Shot from the series "Slave Izaura". This is how slave women worked in Brazil until 1888, although by that time capitalism had won even in backward feudal Japan!
That is, it turns out that practically none, except the very first one, and even then with reservations, the famous scheme of Karl Marx does not fit. Yes, it is simple, understandable, accessible to memorization for the most mediocre mind. But it does not at all reflect all the wealth of socio-economic relations known to us that existed in our society at different stages of its development. Not to mention such an ephemeral formation as communism, with its first phase - socialism.
This is what Karl Marx was like. And on the right - this is what he came up with ...
In the 20s, there was the NEP in the USSR, that is, there were completely market relations, but even then the work of various artels that existed during Stalin's lifetime was also quite marketable. Under Khrushchev, the nationalization of the economy reached its maximum, although market relations persisted between ... economic councils! Then the Kosygin reform - again an attempt to reduce the degree of nationalization of the economy.
And what is the result? Because of what, again, all the same confrontation with the United States, all sorts of Jackson-Vanik amendments directed against our economy ... And this was just an attempt to prove the superiority of one of the two models of economic management.
American - 50x50 percent (public and private sector) and 98 percent of the Soviet state economy. That is, all this, again, is a market, but with a different level of private and state control. So here, too, Marx's theory is obviously failing today, although, of course, he could not have foreseen the emergence of mobile electronic communications and industrial robots.
In any case, it is obvious that one should look for some other division of society into some other ... stages that more reflect the realities of the economy of different eras, allowing one to foresee the future, without resorting to any "isms".
To be continued ...
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