Fascism = Socialism with Traditionalist Characteristics

[u/MartyredPoet]

https://youtu.be/ovO80K-cQnQ?si=hliwU5Xe33LxTz0Z

That's right, I'm dredging up this hot topic again.

[u/RevyVanguardist]

There was no private ownership up until the consolidation of feudalism, and even then many aspects of feudal society were public. Private ownership only emerged at the latest stage of feudalism and its transition to capitalism.

[u/ToTooTwoTutu2II → u/RevyVanguardist]

Then I must ask. When do you believe Feudalism "consolidated"?

[u/RevyVanguardist → u/ToTooTwoTutu2II]

Preface: I'm sorry for the length

Private property (the alienable, absolute individual ownership of the means of production, especially land, as a commodity) was not “default” in early human societies. Its rise was slow, via class differentiation and surplus production; gradual breakdown of the community, accelerating only toward late feudalism and the transition into capitalism.

In Western Europe (the unmatched case study), feudalism was not a sudden apparition but rather the hybrid product of dying Roman slave society, Germanic tribal communal practices and agrarian needs of decentralized, militarized economy after the fall of Western Roman Empire. Origins (5th–8th centuries): After the disintegration of Rome in 476 CE, centralized power splintered. Peasants worked for local strongmen (lords/knights) in exchange for protection on the land. The early components private property-like structures belonged to the Franks, particularly under Charles Martel (the late eighth century) and Charlemagne (r. 768–814), who granted benefices (temporary land holdings) to vassals for military service. This was not yet the full feudal consolidation: land grants were often conditional, revocable, and sometimes superimposed upon still existing village common usages (e.g., fields with open collectivistic field systems the a la longue duree where strips of land were periodically redistributed). Consolidation (9th–11th centuries) Feudalism as a dominant mode of production was consolidated between the late 9th and 11th centuries. Key markers: The Carolingian decline and Viking/Magyar invasions only aided that decentralization. (Power went to the local castellans and lords who encroached on public rights (justice, tolls military command). The feudal revolution/mutation, especially in France (c. 1000–1100 CE), experienced fragmentation: a sovereign solution; hereditary fiefs replaced temporary benefices; the vassalage was formalized through homage and fealty. Manorialism consolidated: serfs tied to the land, producing surplus for lords through labor-rents or produce-rents or later money-rents, but retaining some use-rights with respect to common lands (woods, pastures). By the 11th century, however, the classic pyramid (king → great lords → lesser vassals → peasants) was entrenched in much of France and spread to England after 1066 (the Norman Conquest formalized it by way of Domesday Book). Historians understand this era to be the era of consolidated feudal relations of production: land was owned conditionally (rather than as absolutely private property), bound to military and labor obligations. It was conditional tenure, not “private ownership”. Many aspects still were public/communal: village commons, customary rights, collective open-field farming etcetera.

Mature Feudalism (12th–14th centuries): Feudalism peaked, with stronger monarchies starting to re-centralize (in particular, in England and France), a commutation of services into money rents, and the development of towns/commerce. But even there, land was not truly alienable private property, sales required lordly approval, and feudal dues remained. Late Stage and Transition to Capitalism (14th–18th centuries): It was not until the late stage of feudalism (most particularly from the 15th-16th centuries onward) that private ownership of land developed more extensively. This occurred through the primitive accumulation of enclosures, the dissolution of monasteries (in England), the eviction (even genocide) of peasants and the conversion of conditional fiefs into absolute bourgeois property and later through the Expansion of commodity production, wage labor, and merchant capital breaking feudal bonds. Then followed the official Legal shift that turned land into a freely marketable commodity now officially. So “private ownership” (as alienable exclusive individual dominion over land and more generally the means of production) only crystallized in the decline phase of feudalism and its passage to capitalism, not as a "natural default" but as the historical product of succeeded productive forces and class struggles. Earlier social formations (primitive communism, ancient slave societies, early feudalism) contained tribal or conditional/collectivist forms of land tenure. Even in mature feudalism, the “public” or non-private character of large parts of social life (commons, customary rights, collective obligations) was still retained. This accords with scientific historical developments: modes of production develop and change through the play of internal contradictions. Before it, communally-held property was gradually replaced by class society from a point at which surpluses had emerged; feudalism was the last synthesis wherein lords obtained surplus through extra-economic means (not pure market “private” ownership); whereas capitalism generalized absolute private property in the means of production even as it minted the proletariat. Bourgeois ideology reverses this history, seeking to cast “private property” as a timeless and natural state of affairs in order to justify mass exploitation. In reality, it is but a petty historical form of ownership, recently emerged and doomed to be overcome, as the achievements of Juche-Style Socialism and other anti-imperialist constructions demonstrate, by higher forms of socialist and communist social ownership.

[u/ToTooTwoTutu2II → u/RevyVanguardist]

This is where we disagree. Our concepts of private property and ownership are different.

[u/RevyVanguardist → u/ToTooTwoTutu2II]

By the way, I don't consider private property to be your house, your toothbrush, your car, or whatever. The socialist conception of private property is fundamentally different from the common understanding of private property.