THE GREENS - A Warning from History (Volume One)

Martin Durkin on the start of a roll of historical analysis:

...At this point, you might think, it’s time to turn the tables on the greens to show what a bunch of silly asses they are. How mistaken they are in their diseased worldview. But in the spirit of open-minded enquiry, let us be generous and try hard to do the opposite. Let us strain every muscle to find what is true in what they say. Here goes.
We might start, for example, with Goldsmith’s point that pre-capitalist societies were ‘hierarchically organised’. He is dead right. We can turn for confirmation of this to Professor Rodney Hilton, famous among medieval historians as an authority in the history and social status of peasants (author of The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval Europe and Bondmen Made Free). As Professor Hilton observes, ‘a society composed of nothing but peasants is, if not inconceivable, absent from the historical record.’ As well as the peasants there were always pharaohs, kings, warrior nobles, lords and their retinues, bishops, sheriffs and such – the ruling classes or estates - whom the peasants were obliged to support.

Of course there were peasantries everywhere, he says. And everywhere they were treated much the same, ‘Peasantries formed the basis of every ancient civilisation. Peasants were the primary producers in ancient and medieval societies. In fact, viewed from the perspective of the peasants, there was far less difference than we sometimes imagine between the various pre-capitalist civilisations, like the Chinese, the Egyptian and early medieval. Whatever the political changes up above, the one droning constant was the great mass of oppressed toilers down below.’
What’s more, Professor Hilton observes, ‘the relationship between peasants and lords, though they vary in details, from place to place and from one period to another, show a remarkable continuity from the bronze age until, in some parts of Europe, the 18th and 19th centuries.’
Let us turn to another point the greens are keen to emphasise. The economic existence of these wretched toilers in pre-capitalist society was not based primarily on exchange. Once again, they are spot on. The peasants did not freely exchange their produce with the lords they served. They got nothing in return for their labours. What they produced was expropriated by force. They were coerced. And as Professor Hilton says, ‘No attempt was made to disguise the fact that there was a ruling class which possessed the means of coercion and which depended for its existence on the labours of the classes it ruled, primarily the peasants.’...

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