The Black Death the pandemic that changed the world

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument¶

The central thesis is that the Black Death did not cause the crisis of feudalism but acted as an immense external shock that exposed and accelerated contradictions already developing within the feudal mode of production. The article argues that by the early 14th century, feudalism had reached its developmental limits — agricultural expansion had exhausted available land, productivity stagnated, and the ruling class extracted ever more from an increasingly impoverished peasantry. The plague’s demographic catastrophe broke the labour supply, giving peasants unprecedented bargaining power, which the nobility attempted to reverse through wage controls and taxation. This clash culminated in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, which, though defeated militarily, permanently ended serfdom in England and cleared the ground for the eventual transition to capitalism. The article draws a direct parallel to the present: COVID-19 has not caused capitalism’s crisis but has exposed its deepening contradictions, and the ruling class will attempt to make the working class pay for the recovery, provoking inevitable resistance.

Theoretical Grounding¶

The analysis is rooted in historical materialism, specifically the Marxist theory of social transition. It draws on the concept — articulated by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto and developed in Marx’s Grundrisse and Capital — that social relations of production which once furthered the development of productive forces eventually become fetters upon them. The article applies this to feudalism: the manorial system and serfdom, which had enabled Europe’s recovery from the Dark Ages, by the 14th century blocked further agricultural improvement and crushed the peasantry under unsustainable exactions.

The argument also deploys Gramsci’s concept of interregnum — “a time of monsters” — to describe the period between the decay of one social order and the birth of another. This is a key theoretical device for understanding the 14th–15th centuries as a transitional epoch, not simply a crisis within feudalism but the beginning of its supersession.

The article situates itself within the Marxist tradition that emphasises the primacy of class struggle in driving historical transformation. The Black Death is not treated as a deus ex machina; rather, it is the interaction between the external shock and the internal class dynamics of feudal society that produces the outcome. The Peasants’ Revolt is presented as the conscious political expression of a shift in the balance of class forces that the plague had made possible.

Conjunctural Relevance¶

The article was written in October 2020, eight months into the COVID-19 pandemic. It explicitly draws a parallel between the two pandemics as moments when a social system that had already reached its limits is dealt a blow that exposes its contradictions and triggers a crisis of legitimacy. The article references the specific experience of the pandemic — health services strained to breaking point, governments exposed as incompetent or callous, mass unemployment, and the emergence of movements like Black Lives Matter — as evidence that capitalism’s crisis is not a temporary disruption but a structural breakdown.

The article argues that, as in the 14th century, the ruling class will attempt to make the working class pay for the crisis through austerity and repression. It cites the Poll Tax of 1377–1381 and its violent aftermath as a historical precedent for what happens when the state attempts to shift the burden of crisis onto the exploited. The reference to Thatcher’s poll tax in 1989 — and its similar fate — reinforces the point that such strategies have a long history of provoking mass resistance.

The conjunctural claim is that we are living through a comparable moment of transition: capitalism is decaying, the working class is beginning to stir, and the outcome depends on political organisation and consciousness. The article is thus not merely historical but agitational, arguing that the revolutionary tradition of 1381 must be taken up and completed by the modern working class.

Where the Argument Continues¶

The article is a single piece and does not explicitly reference other IDOM articles, but its argument connects to several ongoing themes in the Marxist tradition and the RCI’s output:

The relationship between pandemics and capitalist crisis has been explored in other IDOM articles on COVID-19, particularly those analysing the economic impact of lockdowns, the暴露 of supply chains, and the state’s response.
The concept of “transition” and the decay of one mode of production before the birth of another is a recurring theme in Marxist historiography. The article implicitly points toward the broader Marxist literature on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, particularly the debates between Maurice Dobb, Paul Sweezy, and Robert Brenner.
The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 is a touchstone for the RCI’s understanding of pre-capitalist class struggle. The article’s reference to the Diggers and the English Revolution suggests a longer historical arc that could be traced through the RCI’s writings on the English Civil War and the bourgeois revolutions.
The argument that the ruling class will attempt to make the working class pay for the crisis is a central political line of the RCI, developed in numerous articles on austerity, the cost-of-living crisis, and the state’s response to COVID-19.

Connections¶

Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto — The passage on the bourgeoisie being “incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery” is directly quoted and applied to feudalism.
Gramsci, Prison Notebooks — The concept of interregnum (“the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”) is used to characterise the 14th–15th centuries and, by implication, the present.
Robert Gottfried, The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe — Cited as a source for the pre-plague crisis of the peasantry.
Ibn Khaldun — The 14th-century historian’s account of the plague in Cairo is quoted, providing a contemporary voice from outside the European narrative.
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down — The reference to the Diggers and the radical egalitarianism of the English Revolution connects to Hill’s work on the radical sects of the 17th century.
The RCI’s own writings on COVID-19 — The article is part of a broader corpus analysing the pandemic as a crisis of capitalism, not a natural disaster.

Key Quotes¶

“No social system, however, is capable of perpetually developing society. At a certain stage, social relations that have served to stimulate progress and development are transformed into fetters on further development. Feudal society had reached this point even before the plague struck.”
“The Black Death did not cause the crisis of feudalism, which had begun decades before yersinia pestis escaped the Gobi desert. Likewise, COVID-19 has not caused the present crisis of capitalism. Both, however, were enormous external shocks, which served to expose and intensify all the contradictions that had been developing under the surface of society.”
“The widespread availability of land and low rents meant that peasants were more mobile than perhaps they ever had been. It became possible for peasants to effectively ‘shop around’, leaving their lords behind in favour of others who offered lower rents and fewer restrictions. Serfdom in this context was both impossible and absurd.”
“The old order was already sick. The plague gave this sickness a tangible and horrific expression.”
“The workers of today are the descendents of the peasant rebels of 1381, who won their freedom only to have it snatched from later generations. In the fight against capital, we inherit their struggle to fulfil the vision of John Ball — that there be no lords or masters, and for all to live free and equal. This time we will finish it.”