Letters from Tomis

An ongoing series of reflections of my thoughts on historical materialism after reading What is Marxism: An Introduction into Marxist Theory by Rob Sewell and Alan Woods. The thoughts, opinions, and any errors are mine alone.

The long, bruising, and often futile struggle of the peasantry against the iron rule of landlords during the feudal epoch is one of the great, if tragic, dramas of history. It is a narrative laden with toil, sacrifice, and yearning for dignity—one that reveals as much about the oppressors as it does about the oppressed. Yet, it is not merely the brute force of the landlords, nor the divine-right pretensions of monarchs, that ultimately undermined this struggle. The peasantry’s quest for liberation was sabotaged by a combination of economic inertia, ideological imprisonment, and their own fragmented consciousness.

To understand the structural impediments to the peasantry’s emancipation, one must first look at the framework of feudal society itself. Feudalism, that exquisite scaffold of exploitation, rested upon a reciprocal fiction. The lord owned the land and, in theory, provided protection and sustenance in return for the peasant’s labor. But this “protection” was often indistinguishable from extortion, and the arrangement left the peasantry with little more than subsistence-level existence. The cycle was perpetuated by custom and law, with the might of the state and the Church sanctifying the arrangement. Resistance was blasphemous as well as treasonous.

Yet, to attribute the failure of the peasants’ struggle solely to external oppression is to miss a vital component. The peasantry themselves were hamstrung by a tragic limitation: their inability to transcend their immediate, localized interests. Toiling in isolated villages, bound by ties of kinship and community, the peasant was more a serf to custom than to any particular lord. Solidarity on a scale large enough to challenge feudal power was rare, often impossible. When revolts did occur—the Jacquerie in France, the German Peasants’ War—they were as much the exception as they were the rule. The sheer rarity of these uprisings demonstrates the difficulty of coordinating action across scattered and insular populations.

Here we encounter one of history’s most pernicious ironies: the very conditions that gave rise to peasant discontent also prevented its effective expression. The peasants’ poverty meant they lacked the means to sustain prolonged rebellion. Their illiteracy ensured that radical ideas spread slowly and unevenly, if at all. And their dependency on the land—for food, shelter, and livelihood—made them acutely vulnerable to retribution. The landlords could afford to wait out rebellion or crush it with merciless efficiency. The peasants, by contrast, could rarely afford even a week without harvest.

Another formidable opponent of the peasantry was ideology itself. Religion, often described as the “opium of the people,” played a dual role in this conflict. On the one hand, it occasionally provided a vocabulary of resistance: the notion of a “Kingdom of Heaven” where the meek would inherit the earth resonated deeply with those trampled by worldly power. On the other hand, this very promise of a better life after death was a soporific, discouraging action in the here and now. The Church, far from being a neutral arbiter, was frequently an accomplice of the landlords, its priests preaching submission while pocketing the tithes of the poor. The theological underpinnings of feudalism were an almost perfect mechanism for ensuring that the oppressed internalized their oppression.

Finally, one must consider the broader historical forces that made the struggle of the peasantry increasingly irrelevant. The rise of urban centers, the expansion of trade, and the gradual dissolution of feudal economies into capitalist ones shifted the locus of class conflict from the countryside to the city. The peasants’ grievances, rooted in an agrarian economy, were bypassed by the inexorable march of industrialization. The landlord was supplanted by the factory owner, and the peasant by the wage laborer. The struggle continued, but its stage and actors had changed.

To lament the failure of the peasantry is not to romanticize their struggle. They were, after all, fighting not for utopia but for a modest improvement in their condition—less tax, fewer obligations, the right to their own harvests. Yet, even these humble aims were thwarted by forces larger than themselves. The landlords, armed with law, tradition, and force, were a formidable foe. But it was the peasantry’s own isolation, their ideological conditioning, and the tides of history that ultimately conspired to undermine their cause.

It is a sobering reflection, but one that ought not to induce despair. For history, though often unjust, is not without its moments of redemption. The struggles of the peasantry, though crushed, laid the groundwork for future revolutions. Their cries for dignity, though silenced, echo still. And their lives, though lived in hardship, remind us of the resilience of the human spirit—even in the shadow of oppression. It is left to us, the inheritors of their struggle, to ensure that their sacrifices were not in vain.