The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism and the Problem of Temporalization—on the 100th Anniversary of Witold Kula’s Birth

The Marxist social historian Witold Kula (1916– 1988) demonstrated more thoroughly than any other scholar that the changes in the conditions of agricultural production also changed ‘historical time’. Kula describes the period between 1770 and 1880 as a transition zone in which an acceleration of historical time occurs because it does not yet correspond to experience. The historical process bursts open the old European continuum of experience, and the first category in which the temporal difference between experience and expectation is conceptualized is the term ‘progress’. He does not, however, consider this transition from the feudal to the capitalist movement pattern to be fluent. According to Kula, capitalism in most countries did not develop out of the feudal economy or as a consequence of gradual changes within the system, but developed above it as an autonomous system in the form of a superstructure. Stability through cyclicity In the last century, the transition from feudalism to capitalism has been the subject of a number of debates on both sides of the Atlantic. This was particularly the case in the 60s and 70s when the topic served to position economic history firmly within the historical sciences and philosophy. As part of this quest for the realignment of economic history as a field of research, some historians favorably disposed to philosophy were resolute in their insistence on the philosophical roots of the economic sciences, in an endeavor to secure a firm place for philosophy—or, to be more precise, for Marx’s philosophical categories—within historical studies (see as an example: Kittsteiner 1980). Those historians, on the other hand, who favored researching socio-economic structures endeavored to establish the economic sciences as a subdivision of social history, and to strip them of any budding historical-philosophical tendencies (cf. Wehler 1973). If one were to ask today any scholar of modern history interested or involved in these past debates whether he or she had been aware of an Eastern European position on this discussion, the answer would most certainly be in the affirmaAgnieszka Pufelska, Universität Potsdam (UP) OpenAccess. © 2018 Agnieszka Pufelska, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110492415-021 Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 12:15 AM tive (in the case of Marx readers, not without a degree of cheer), and Witold Kula would be named. His books, and first and foremost his An Economic Theory of the Feudal System, were read, valued and criticized by both camps.Whereas social historians were interested in Kula’s analyses of the feudal social order, their adversaries concentrated mainly on his universal historical model of economic theory, or his dynamic functional model of the feudal economy. But who was this Polish scholar,whose feudalism theory won recognition far beyond the borders of Europe? Witold Kula was born in Warsaw in 1916 into a Protestant family of German descent. After graduating in Economics and History from the University of Warsaw, he lectured at a private university, where he defended his doctoral thesis in 1939. During the Second World War, he was a member of the Home Army and was taken prisoner by the Germans. In 1945 he returned to Poland and immediately took up his academic career. He obtained his post-doctoral degree (Habilitation) from the University of Łódź in 1947, following which he received a scholarship for two years in Paris, where he was influenced by the Annales school. Shortly after his return, he was appointed Professor at Warsaw University where he held the Chair for Economic History until 1975. By then seriously ill, he had to give up his academic teaching at the age of just 60. Witold Kula died in Warsaw on 12 February 1988. Kula’s academic work consists mainly of studies on Polish economic history, but he also worked intensively on the methodological and theoretical problems of the historical sciences. His most well known work in this field is the book that appeared in 1963 entitled The Problems and Methods of Economic History. It is in this almost 800-page work of a universalist nature that Kula most clearly formulates his methodology. He accepts, not only in a formal sense, the progressive tenets of Marxist methodology and assumes the position of Marxist periodization that is based on the development of socio-economic formations. “For the Marxists,” Kula writes, “the periodisation of history is, therefore, equally a synthesis of historical cognition and a tool thereof” (Kula 1963, p. 175). One of the central problems in Kula’s work is the question of synthesis in economic history. He emphasizes the essential differences between the courses of many economic processes in diverse social orders and draws attention to the limited comparability of these processes. The disparity between the socioeconomic systems necessitates a different methodological approach that, in turn, should result in a synthesis determined by time and space. In the most renowned of his works, the above-mentioned An Economic Theory of the Feudal System, Kula uses the Polish transition from feudalism to capitalism to describe how this research method could be applied. The book was first published in 1962 but only became known in Western Europe in the 1970s when it was translated, 288 Agnieszka Pufelska Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 12:15 AM first into French and then into English. What, in Kula’s opinion, were the conditions that such a theory should fulfill? We can say that the task of every economic theory of a system consists in formulating the laws governing the volume of the economic surplus and its utilization and that these problems have to be explained in the short-term and in the long-term. (Kula 1976, p. 27) However, in order to speak of the conclusion or the climax of an economic theory, Kula argues that it has to be able to explain the transformation of one given system into another (Kula 1976, p. 27). Clearly, Kula attempts in his feudalism research to investigate what Marx did not achieve—at least not as an independent analysis—and that he only analyzed based on what was apparent to him from the viewpoint of the emerging capitalist mode of production. It is not in vain that Kula’s temporal framework of the 16th to the 19th centuries covers Marx’s history of ‘primitive accumulation’, i.e. the history of the separation of the direct producers from their means of production and nourishment, which was for Marx the core of the history of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.1 In Kula’s historical reconstruction, the first signs of economic decline in Poland are evident in the 16th century, otherwise seen as the ‘golden century’, characterized by economic, cultural and political development. Kula sees the causes for this in the strengthening of serfdom and the corresponding increase in the power of the nobility. Their high standard of living was supported by an economy that guaranteed Poland the position of a European granary and enabled the aristocracy to import luxury goods from abroad. Whilst the aristocracy thus had close connections with the international market, also through the ‘term of trade’, the peasants remained excluded and increasingly tied to feudal dependencies. This process reached its climax in the so-called ‘crisis of the 17th century’, which was heightened in Poland by external influences such as the wars against the Cossacks and Sweden. The country fell into a state of economic backwardness characterized by a concentration of land ownership in the form of estates ruled by the wealthy nobility. All types of feudal dues, both ordinary and extraordinary, were fully developed and the peasants’ obligations had become very oppressive. An analysis of surviving invoices showing income and expenditure of several feudal estates led Kula to conclude that, when considering only monetary expenditure and income,  Marx writes: “The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former.” (Marx 1972, p. 743.) The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism 289 Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 12:15 AM these estates must have produced a substantial yield, but that if the material effort (not measured in terms of money) in the form of corvées obligations was calculated into this, the result would be a large deficit: “The average peasant does not take into account the cost of family labor nor interest on capital because he has not knowledge of such categories and does not know how to make accurate calculations” (Kula 1976, p. 41). The farms were inefficient without knowing it. In Kula’s opinion, this is not simply an invoicing problem: he derives from it a ‘two-sector system’, i.e. the side-by-side existence of a monetary and a natural economy. The peasants who belonged to the nobility had to pay them dues, mostly as payment in kind, but they were also obliged to perform certain services for the nobility. The activities of the noble landowners on the other hand, were oriented around a market where they exchanged the peasants’ dues for money, such that their calculations were focused on increasing income from the manorial estate. Under manorial rule, the production of commodities was successfully developed: the ruling class used their privileges to secure cheap labor power, raw materials and advantages in selling their goods. The feudal lords were thus able to make good use of the economic advantages of peasant agriculture; that is, of low labor costs, high labor intensity and low unproductive expenses. The lower the intensity and productivity of agricultural labor, the more the manorial lords attempted to reduce production costs by increasing feudal labor obligations. Feudal labor service reduced production and tr