Priests and warriors
Relationship to the means of production is a crap definition of class.
The next in my series Worshipping the Future is up on Helen Dale’s Substack. It discusses how state taxation dominates the creation and extraction of surplus and hence Marx got the state, class and surplus very wrong.
I am paid to be a medievalist. That is, I am paid to put on medieval and ancient days for schools. I have also presented papers on medieval history.
So, as a medievalist, Marx’s definition of class as being based on “relationship to the means of production” is a crap definition of class.
Consider the three estates of medieval social theory: warriors, priests and peasants (and other workers). Peasants are overwhelmingly farmers. They might be serfs, they might be free peasants. They might be tenants, they might be freeholders. But, mostly they farm. Which is a relationship to the means of production.
The same can be said of artisans (skilled workers of various varieties) and merchants. They might be self-employed. They might be employed by others. But they are also in particular relations to the means of production.
Warriors and priests are where the relationship to means of production model of class breaks down. Particularly if we do not just confine ourselves to medieval Europe.
Warrior franchises
For those who fight, the providers of violence, can be soldiers. That is, they can be paid employees. They can have their training, equipment and salary, or some combination of the same, provided by their employer. Which might be the state. Or a local notable. Or a merchant. Or a self-governing city. Or a caravan. Or a mercenary condottieri or equivalent.
Alternatively, they might be warriors. That is, folk whose family arranged their training, who bought or acquired their own equipment and who needed to find some way to fund themselves.
What makes a medieval society distinctively a medieval society is, in fact, the warrior franchise. That is, mounted armoured warriors who directly acquired their own income from local peasant farmers and owed military service to some lord or ruler (hence franchise).
They might do so by being landowners, with their landholding having varying levels of conditionality. All the way from being freeholders to only holding such land so long as they provided the designated services to whoever they held the land from.
Alternatively, they might simply be tax collectors. That is, they have the right to collect the taxes within their designated (tax) fief.
This is the pattern one sees in Islam, with its iqta, timar, tuyul, jagir, and so on. The late medieval Roman (“Byzantine”) pronoia were fairly clearly adaptations of the iqta warrior-tax-fief system that had existed in Islam since the time of the Buyids (934-1062).
Warrior franchises operating under Sharia could not be landholdings in the full sense. For that would make them subject to Sharia inheritance rules, which required property to be divided among all legal children.
A mounted, armoured warrior was expensive. If they were landholders, and so subject to the inheritance rules of Sharia, the capacity of landholdings to support such a warrior would disappear in a generation.
Hence holders of Islamic warrior franchises were given the right to collect taxes which, at least formally, was not a form of private property. So was not subject to Sharia inheritance rules. Instead, they were a matter of state administration that the ruler had legislative power over.
In law-is-not-based-on-revelation Christian Europe, primogeniture could ensure than landholdings remained intact and able to support knight’s service. In fact, manors effectively operated as mini-states, with the manor-holder collecting rents and taxes and providing local protection and adjudication services.
What all these cases had in common is that their key feature was that they were providers of violence. In the cases of the various forms of the warrior franchise, mounted providers of violence.
Hence you do not see the warrior franchise in polities unable to raise substantial numbers of horses locally (China, due to the lack of selenium in the soil) or in tropical areas where elephants were the main striking arm (Southern India and South-East Asia).
The “relationship to the means of production” of such warrior elites was contingent on them being mounted providers of violence. The specifics of their income source varied greatly depending on local institutional constraints and conveniences.
The common feature was that a mounted, armoured warrior could dominate a group of peasant farmers, so could collect their income directly. A useful economising on administration costs. Especially as there were very little in the way of economies of scale in training and equipping mounted armoured warriors.
Economising on administrative costs by getting them to collect their income themselves made a great deal of sense. Hence some form of the warrior franchise was ubiquitous across societies relying on mounted, armoured warriors as their main striking arm. From the Parthian Empire (247BC-224AD) of the Iranian plateau (the earliest unambiguous case) to final abolition of such systems in Japan and the Islamic world over the course of the C19th.
A system that operated across temperate Eurasia, from the Atlantic coast to Japan, for over two millennia. One that kept being re-invented in different, but recognisable, forms in different times and places. Clearly, it had persistent advantages operating in its favour.
One of the failings of the later Western Roman Empire was that it attempted to shift towards mounted armoured cavalry as its main striking arm while still using a centralised, highly bureaucratised, tax-and-payment system. Once the Battle of Adrianople (378) showed that the Romans had lost their operational advantage over their troublesome Germanic neighbours, operating a much more expensive administrative tail to put troops in the field was bound to tell against them over time.
Priests and clerics
Then we come to priests, clerics and monastics. The providers of ritual services.
They could be landowners. They could be paid employees. They could rely on donations. Or some combination thereof. They simply had no standard relationship to the means of production.
To be the providers of ritual services was no small thing. But it is not a relationship-to-the-means-of-production thing.
Being providers of ritual services put them at the intersection of their two main roles. To provide social coordination services by propagating norms and taboos. To provide meaning frameworks, a sense of our place in the world. Including narratives supporting the same.
In other words, to help folk cope with being self-conscious beings who rely on high levels of cooperation and coordination. With rituals providing a shared sense of meaningful togetherness.
These are important roles. That is why we see them in every complex society. If we take the role back to shaman or their equivalents, then their role extends tens of thousands of years into prehistory. But it is not remotely a “relationship to the means of production” role.
There is a great deal more to making human societies work that just producing stuff. Class structures of complex societies reflect that.
It is true: humans really do not live by bread alone. Too bad Marx failed to understand that.
Excellent companion piece.
Great rebuttal of Marx.