And so they got together, and you know what they eventually did? They formed
political associations. They could give him lots of different names. They
eventually gave them the name of a political party. And they said to the
king: "We'll pay you taxes but you have to set up a place where we get to talk
about what we want to be done with the taxes. And the place where we want to
talk is called the place where (to use the French word "parle," where we speak) is
called the parliament, where you go to speak. And who speaks? The capitalists to
the king: "we want our share of what goes on." The King needed the taxes in order to
run the big system that he was the king of. So he had to kind of meet them
halfway although he wasn't happy about it. And we begin to get the capitalists
with their own political party fighting against the king and the lords, and
struggling over power, because it turned out these two systems didn't live
together real well. The lords and serfs, particularly the Lords, were very
suspicious of the capitalists and vice versa, and for good reason.
This kind of tension builds up across the later part of feudalism until the
capitalists are strong enough, in the cities where they are based, have enough
[ex-]serfs, that they begin to demand that the policies of the King be tilted less
towards feudalism, more towards capitalism. But that threatens the feudalists
because they need that King to protect them and they don't want to
support a capitalism which is the draw that pulls people off the countryside
who are serfs (because difficult as it is, their chances are better in that newer
system developing in the towns). We know where this story ends. It ends in the
French Revolution when the new, emerging merchants-employers in the cities, with
their employees, realize that the future is theirs, and that they need to end this
struggle by ending the feudalism. And they make revolutions to do so. And
that's how capitalism is born. It's born first within the shell of an old
feudalism, coming out of the contradictions of that feudalism, making
those contradictions (not intentionally but by their very growth) more acute,
struggling now for their own political organizations to have their own
political force and power on the feudal Kings, forcing slowly, with much conflict,
compromises and concessions from that King, until they're strong enough to push
feudalism aside historically and bring the world into the newer arrangement of
capitalism. Replacing [the] Lord and serf system with employer-employee system.
Replacing a system [that is] mostly agricultural with one that's mostly industrial.
Replacing a feudalism that's mostly rural with a capitalism that's mostly urban.
Why am I telling you this story? Because inside capitalism the same thing
is now happening; a parallel story. What's happening are worker co-ops, in Spain, in
France, in Germany, but now in the United States, and everywhere. Workers are saying
"we don't want to live in the way capitalism assigns us. It's too unequal,
it's too unstable (with its every four to seven year downturns). It's not a bearable
system. We are looking for alternatives and finding them in starting up our own
collective businesses. In the second half of today's show I'm gonna talk about
what strategy that implies for going forward.