>>2866004>doubled artisan wages, halved agricultural production, and immediately pushed Europe into a peasant rebellion lead by Wat Tyler, beginning the decline of serfdom in England, and beginning the long path to Capitalism and Industrial Revolution.Yes and no - while it is true that wages increased under the "golden age" of the plague (how condescending), it only equalised between day labourers and demesne workers around a century later, where the composite wage was transformed into a money wage (alongside individual accounts for workers, beginning at the beginning of the 15th century). The individuality of labour and its full cash payment offers the managerial structure of workers:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014498324000524Wat Tyler's Peasant Rebellion (1381) was also largely due to the taxation imposed from the government for the Hundred Years' War (1337–1453), although there was a certain moral idealism in the cause, but most especially from the preacher John Ball (1381):
<When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Cast_off_the_Yoke_of_BondageThis Christian Socialism extends to Winstanley later on (1649-52):
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/winstanley/index.htmAttributing the cause of the decline of serfdom to the Rebellion is a noce thought, but I'm not sure this can be said, exactly. The state did not submit to the demands, but tax collection was softened. In Ellen Meiksins Wood's book "The Origin of Capitalism" (1999), she writes of how the transition from feudalism to capitalism is poorly explained by basically every writer; most of whom propose a "commercialisation" model, that the market was 'liberated' and capitalism proceeded automatically. The "Commercial Revolution" is written about in Lopez's 1973 book, but this only spans from [950-1350 CE], after which there is a decline of commerce, the same as what Marx writes - that capitalism cannot be causal of commerce:
<In Italy, where capitalistic production developed earliest, the dissolution of serfdom also took place earlier than elsewhere. […] When the revolution of the world-market, about the end of the 15th century, annihilated Northern Italy’s commercial supremacy, a movement in the reverse direction set in. The labourers of the towns were driven en masse into the country, and gave an impulse, never before seen, to the petite culture, carried on in the form of gardening.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm<In the pre-capitalist stages of society commerce ruled industry. In modern society the reverse is true. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch20.htmOf course, after the Hundred Years' War, we soon get the War of the Roses (1455-87) which sees the Tudors come to power, and Marx begins the history of Primitive Accumulation here. So then, the period between 1380 and 1480 is ambiguous, but it is what lays the ground work for capitalism. Marx offers correlatives on the topic:
<The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China, &c.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htmI would be willing to see the Peasant Rebellion as an historical turning point, but I don't think it is a direct cause of capitalism.