The birth of capitalism: A twenty-first-century perspective

Heller, Henry Book — Published Version The birth of capitalism: A twenty-first-century perspective The Future of World Capitalism Provided in Cooperation with: Pluto Press Suggested Citation: Heller, Henry (2011) : The birth of capitalism: A twenty-first-century perspective, The Future of World Capitalism, ISBN 978-1-84964-613-0, Pluto Press, London, https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12657/30778 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/182429 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode The BirTh of CapiTalism heller prelims.indd 1 6/7/2011 11:43:31 AM The Future of World Capitalism series editors: radhika Desai and alan freeman The world is undergoing a major realignment. The 2008 financial crash and ensuing recession, China’s unremitting economic advance, and the uprisings in the Middle East, are laying to rest all dreams of an ‘American Century’. This key moment in history makes weighty intellectual demands on all who wish to understand and shape the future. Theoretical debate has been derailed, and critical thinking stifled, by apologetic and superficial ideas with almost no explanatory value, ‘globalization’ being only the best known. academic political economy has failed to anticipate the key events now shaping the world, and offers few useful insights on how to react to them. The future of World Capitalism series will foster intellectual renewal, restoring the radical heritage that gave us the international labour movement, the women’s movement, classical marxism, and the great revolutions of the twentieth century. it will unite them with new thinking inspired by modern struggles for civil rights, social justice, sustainability, and peace, giving theoretical expression to the voices of change of the twenty-first century. Drawing on an international set of authors, and a world-wide readership, combining rigour with accessibility and relevance, this series will set a reference standard for critical publishing. also available: Remaking Scarcity: From Capitalist Inefficiency to Economic Democracy Costas panayotakis heller prelims.indd 2 6/7/2011 11:43:31 AM The Birth of Capitalism a Twenty-first-Century perspective henry heller Fernwood Publishing HALIFAX & WINNIPEG www.fernwoodpublishing.ca heller prelims.indd 3 6/7/2011 11:43:31 AM First published 2011 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Published in Canada by Fernwood Publishing 32 Oceanvista Lane, Black Point, Nova Scotia, B0J 1B0 and 748 Broadway Avenue, Winnipeg, MB R3G 0X3 www.fernwoodpublishing.ca Fernwood Publishing Company Limited gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Nova Scotia Department of Tourism and Culture and the Province of Manitoba, through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, for our publishing program. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Heller, Henry, 1938The birth of capitalism : a twenty-first century perspective / Henry Heller. (The future of world capitalism) ISBN 978-1-55266-452-0 1. Capitalism--History. I. Title. II. Series: Future of world capitalism (Winnipeg, Man.) HB501.H439 2011 330.12'2 C2011-902371-7 Copyright © Henry Heller 2011 The right of Henry Heller to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7453 2960 4 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 2959 8 Paperback (Pluto Press) ISBN 978 1 55266 452 0 Paperback (Fernwood) Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Curran Publishing Services, Norwich, UK Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America heller prelims.indd 4 6/7/2011 11:43:31 AM For Rebecca and David heller prelims.indd 5 6/7/2011 11:43:31 AM heller prelims.indd 6 6/7/2011 11:43:31 AM Contents Preface and acknowledgements xi Introduction: problems and methods 1 Capitalist origins and crises 3 economism and eurocentrism 4 an alternative reading 5 plan of the book 7 The argument 9 The unity of the marxist method 11 alternatives to marxism 13 marxism and history 15 Capitalism and world history 20 1 The decline of feudalism 23 Dobb’s opening gambit 24 Dobb versus sweezy 27 Takahashi and hilton 28 Class struggle 30 The role of towns 31 Uneven development 32 The New left takes over 34 Japanese feudalism 35 The last rampart of feudalism 38 Brenner and the late medieval crisis 40 The east–West divide 41 The logic of accumulation 42 Bois objects 43 harman’s riposte 45 The role of social differentiation 47 Dialectics of social relations 50 2 Experiments in capitalism: Italy, Germany, France 52 renaissance italy 54 vii heller prelims.indd 7 6/7/2011 11:43:31 AM heller prelims.indd 14 6/7/2011 11:43:31 AM IntroductIon: Problems and methods The focus of this work is the long evolution from feudalism to capitalism, the most debated and best known among transitions from one mode of production to another. It took 500 years for this transition to unfold in Europe, and it is still taking place in Asia, Africa and Latin America. This transformation began in Europe with the crisis of the feudal system in the fourteenth century and continued until the Industrial Revolution (1780–1850). In this book, I consider this European-centred transition, but do not limit the discussion to Europe. As Marx emphasized, the birth of capitalist relations of production witnessed the simultaneous genesis of the world market. Moreover, from the perspective of the twentyfirst century in which capitalist relations of production have spread everywhere and in which multiple centres of accumulation exist, a perspective limited to Europe, or worse, only to England (as it is in the work of some writers on the transition), would simply be parochial. Bringing this debate up to date is not merely an academic matter. Positions taken on the chief issues in debate will inform responses to the current crisis of capitalism. At the same time all the protagonists in the controversy have agreed that capitalism cannot be understood without understanding its history. Capitalism may be a forward-looking system which functions on the basis of the continuing expectation of profit. But it is also a system based in a historically evolving set of relations – including sale of wage labour and production and circulation of commodities in markets. These operate within a network of financial, legal-political and cultural institutions which are indispensable to their function. Profits emerge out of the particular way in which this system channels the forces of production. The articulated relationship between the forces of production and the social relations of production of a given stage of world history is called by Marxists a ‘mode of production’. In the Marxist conception, there are five or six modes of production: hunting and gathering, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and socialism. While the historical relationship of these different modes and the existence of the sixth or Asian mode of production are in dispute, it is generally accepted that capitalism organized around profit-making must be understood as a system in terms of the relationship between its various parts heller maintext.indd 1 6/7/2011 11:50:54 AM 2 the birth o f capitalism – economic, political and cultural. It must also be understood temporally. These parts come together into a profit-generating system or mode of production through a concrete historical process. As I have noted capitalism is dynamic, fundamentally oriented toward the future, and the fact that today its intellectual apologists are having difficulty envisaging its future is symptomatically quite important. The profits that continue to drive it forward have depended on the existence of private property, the exploitation of what is not private property as a free good, the availability of an intellectually as well as materially alienated work force and the existence of the sovereign territorial state. The territorial state provided an essential political framework within which private capitals sustained by capitalist relations of production emerged and were integrated into a system. In other words markets were created politically as well as economically. It is a central thesis of this book that markets, too, have a real history. In any case it is important that the continued existence of such preconditions for profit-making are today imperilled, and this requires that we try to understand how the elements that compose capitalism came into existence, and how they came to constitute a system. The scope of this study may seem daunting at first. However, my task here is concerned not primarily with the concrete details of this great historical transformation but with assessing the critical debates that it prompted between Marxist luminaries such as Maurice Dobb, Paul Sweezy, Rodney Hilton, Eric Hobsbawm, Robert Brenner, Immanuel Wallerstein, Perry Anderson, Terence J. Byres and Giovanni Arrighi. While their works are indeed great historical labours in their own right, the topics and issues highlighted by them have helped to organize the historical content of the present narrative. In particular, Brenner’s own enormous, wideranging and controversial scholarship, extending from late medieval Europe to early modern England, Holland and China, and that of his followers – Ellen Wood, Benno Teschke and George Comninel – bound together loosely in the school of Political Marxism, is one of the most important threads connecting this work. When I say that that these elements of profit-making were historically constituted I mean that they were neither determined in advance nor did they occur by chance. From the beginning I insist that the initial encounter between the owners of money and proletarians was not predetermined and might not have happened at all. On the other hand, I argue that this historical conjuncture did not come about at a throw of the dice. History is not determined but it heller maintext.indd 2 6/7/2011 11:50:54 AM introduction: problems and methods 3 is not entirely the result of chance either. The responsibility of the historian is to elicit as well as possible what concrete and determinate lines of causation contributed to the emergence of capitalism. Understanding the balance between determinacy and indeterminacy is critical to gaining a perspective on the important factors at play in the past as well as in the current crisis. This introduction begins by briefly recalling the history of the largely Marxist scholarship on the origins of capitalism, noting its close connection to contemporary politics and crises. It goes on to give an overview of the book and its argument. It concludes with a consideration of Eurocentrism, a position which, while always problematic both morally and intellectually, has simply been rendered obsolete by the strength of capitalist development far beyond the shores of Europe and its offshoots, and even beyond Japan. Capitalism undoubtedly broke through in Europe. But we assert the existence of a non-European proto-capitalism, and accordingly reject an exclusive Anglocentric or Western European approach to capitalist origins, and insist on the historically late appearance of European economic superiority based on capitalism. caPItalIst orIgIns and crIses My discussion focuses initially on the rich and contentious literature on the transition to capitalism that emerged in the wake of Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism, published soon after the Second World War ended.1 For all the writers involved in this discussion, understanding capitalism’s origins was always a political undertaking, and for most scholars engaged in the enterprise it was an endeavour which sought to look beyond capitalism toward the establishment of a humane, equal and freer order – in other words, socialism. The catastrophe of the two great wars and the Great Depression focused the attention of Dobb on the transition question because of his sense that the capitalist system had entered into deep, possibly terminal, crisis. The result was an outline of a history of capitalism as a unified system with a beginning, middle and possible end. For him, the transition from feudalism to capitalism became the only clear and well-documented example of a passage from one mode of production to another.2 And understanding it could help to illuminate possibilities beyond capitalism. Though Dobb’s immediate expectations of the imminent end of capitalism were disappointed as capitalism stabilized after the war, the publication of his work provoked considerable debate heller maintext.indd 3 6/7/2011 11:50:54 AM 4 the birth o f capitalism in the 1950s, and a second and revised edition of Studies in the Development of Capitalism appeared in 1963.3 The political upheavals of the 1960s and economic crises of the 1970s produced a second round of debate on the transition, whose fruits included Hilton’s review of the initial debate and influential new works by Immanuel Wallerstein, Perry Anderson and Robert Brenner.4 Today, 65 years after Dobb wrote, Marxist scholarship stands at a particularly interesting conjuncture. On the one hand the historic hegemony of Western capitalism over the rest of the world is in serious doubt as rival centres of capitalist accumulation appear in China, India and other ‘emerging economies’ and link up with one another.5 On the other, scepticism about the future of capitalism is more widespread than in Dobb’s time, its links to economic growth are questioned, and ecological and energy crises loom. A fresh round of scholarly re-examination of capitalism’s origins and of the transition from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production is taking place.6 The French medieval historian Guy Bois, for example, has explicitly compared the deeper causes of the crisis with those that lay behind the crisis of feudalism. He points out that the current crisis, like that of feudalism, is marked by ongoing large-scale unemployment, growing insecurity, violence, social marginalization and outbursts of irrationality egged on by the upper classes.7 economIsm and eurocentrIsm Rich though it was, the literature on the transition from Dobb onwards took both an economistic and a Eurocentric view of capitalism’s origins, conceiving capitalism as a purely economic system and either assuming it to be a quintessentially European phenomenon or defining it in ways that left the distinctiveness of capitalism outside Europe out of account. These views are historically incorrect and impede a political and suitably universal understanding of capitalism. Both mar the otherwise brilliant contributions of Brenner. While Brenner broke new ground in stressing the importance of class struggle and the significance of agrarian capitalism in the transition, we argue that he disregarded the importance of the state as the ultimate linchpin of capitalism. For him, the extraction of relative surplus value – increases in investment increasing labour’s productivity and therefore surplus value and reducing the value of labour power by lowering of the value of goods consumed by workers – and the competitive markets that made it an imperative were capitalism’s defining features. However, as we show, they emerged only as the heller maintext.indd 4 6/7/2011 11:50:54 AM introduction: problems and methods 5 result of a long process which involved the state as much as markets. Brenner’s economism also leads to an anachronistic understanding of the capitalist market and downplays the significance of primitive accumulation and absolute exploitation on a world scale. The undeniable rising productivity of social labour highlighted by Brenner leads him to devalue and ignore the indispensable accumulation of capital that precedes it. Such economism cannot understand capitalism’s historic power and its vulnerabilities, which are political. Economism also leads Brenner and his school to wrongly dismiss the importance of state-backed colonialism and to assume the West’s economic superiority ab initio. This school also downplays the role of the early modern revolutions in the progress of capitalism, regarding them at best as icing on the cake of an already established capitalism, or at worst as non-capitalist events. As we show, the revolutionary transformation of the state was the critical step in the transition to capitalism. Brenner’s Eurocentrism is related to this minimizing of the importance of revolution in the past and future. He argues that while rural petty producers played a revolutionary role in undermining feudalism in the fourteenth century, thereafter they became economically timid or defensive. The initiative in starting capitalism was taken instead by landlords. We argue, however, that once the constraints of feudalism were removed, an upper layer of petty producers played an aggressive social and economic role in the inception of agrarian as well as early industrial capitalism. Petty producers also played a critical role as the mass base of revolutionary change. It is important to recognize this because it relates to the possibilities of peasant and worker resistance to imperialism in the under-developed world, and the historical importance of the political mobilization of the mass of humanity in the transition not only from feudalism to capitalism, but potentially from capitalism to socialism. an alternatIve readIng This book provides a more complex and nuanced understanding of capitalism’s origins. At the birth of capitalism the West was geographically, economically and culturally marginal in the world. In the Middle East, China, Japan and India, the forces of production were equally or more developed. The breakthrough toward capitalism in Europe was a result of a prolonged period of class conflict between the feudal ruling classes and peasants and artisans, during which the balance swung sufficiently away from the former to permit heller maintext.indd 5 6/7/2011 11:50:54 AM 6 the birth o f capitalism capitalism to emerge. In similar conflicts in China, Japan, India and the Middle East, however, the balance of power remained, at this time, sufficiently in favour of the ruling classes to prevent rupture. And though capitalism’s productive superiority over the labourintensive economy of, say, China was visible by the late seventeenth century, it did not become globally significant until after 1800. Within Western countries, dispossession of producers from the means of production and the increase and intensification of work – in other words, primitive accumulation and absolute surplus value, both backed by the state – played their part in capitalism’s development as much as markets and technical improvements. Abroad, the growing divergence in the economic fortunes of the West and the rest was compounded by aggressive state-sponsored Western conquest, pillage and appropriation of the wealth, land, labour and techniques of non-Western societies as well as the resulting foreclosure of the possibility of an early capitalist breakthrough through Western political domination. The decline of feudalism in Western Europe began with the series of late medieval revolts of peasants and craftspeople prompted by economic crisis. The royal territorial states which initially emerged to guarantee the continued class rule of the landlords against the upsurge of producers formed a critical political bridge between feudalism and capitalism. By the sixteenth century the balance of class forces forced these states to provide an arena for the generalization and integration of capitalist relations of production, while the breakdown of the feudal order allowed the differentiation of producers into capitalists and wage workers, a process which was greatly aided by the state in England, and to a lesser degree on the Continent. Expansion of production within this new economic order necessitated the creation of home and world markets in which commodities, which was the form products took, could be exchanged. Once again, the state backed the process. Thus, from its beginnings, capitalist development was not merely market-driven. Rather, markets emerged at the national level only as a result of prolonged political and class conflicts, and were established by the coercive, legal and political machinery of the early modern absolutist states which gradually cleared obstacles to them. The bourgeois political and social revolutions in Holland, England and France overthrew the feudal ruling classes of these territorial states and then harnessed them to complete the development of markets and the full entry of capital into agriculture and manufacturing. The revolutionaries, like the protagonists of the late medieval revolts, were petty producers led by the capitalist class that heller maintext.indd 6 6/7/2011 11:50:54 AM introduction: problems and methods 7 had emerged from their ranks. The resulting development of exportoriented manufacturing combined with colonialism, the slave trade and the plantation-slave system guided by the mercantilist state proved crucial not only to facilitating ongoing capital accumulation but also to overcoming Europe’s backward and peripheral global position by establishing first military/political and later economic superiority over the non-European world. It is now acknowledged that capitalism’s development cannot be understood without comprehending the intrinsic importance of the state.8 It is only by denying the centrality of the state’s role in the development of capitalism in Western Europe that a false contrast is set up between this allegedly ‘classic’ European route, conceived in a largely economistic fashion, and the ways in which capitalism developed elsewhere. The fact is that once under way, capitalism and imperialism threatened other political and social formations. Many places – initially in the immediate periphery of the core Western states, for example in Scotland, Prussia and Russia, but later farther afield, for example in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan – eventually witnessed capitalisms imposed from above, by the state. In these processes, still ongoing in the early twenty-first century, capitalist landlords and/or the state undoubtedly assumed the initiative to combat the adverse consequences of uneven development by engaging in forms of combined development. Combined and uneven development entailed a simultaneous struggle to overcome the barriers to development posed by the capitalism of more advanced states and the backwardness of the traditional economic sectors by far-reaching state intervention. This meant that rather than repeating the stages of previous capitalist development, latecomers sought to absorb earlier advances and used them to emerge in the forefront of capitalist development and profit-making. The role of politics and the state – already large in the development of early capitalism – loomed even larger in these later instances. Plan of the book Chapter 1 addresses the decline of feudalism in the West and its resilience elsewhere. Chapters 2 and 3 stress the historical significance of relative surplus value and capitalist markets. All three stress the decisive importance of the state in the processes they discuss. Chapter 2 discusses early modern capitalism in Italy – where, after all, capitalist accumulation, albeit focused on commerce and finance, began – and in Germany and France, where it has been denied or ignored. heller maintext.indd 7 6/7/2011 11:50:54 AM 8 the birth o f capitalism Capitalist activity, we argue, sprouted in the late medieval and early modern periods across Western Europe in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, France and even Spain. Understanding where capitalism developed further, and where such early development was interrupted, also demonstrates the existence of a specifically French route to capitalism which led to the revolution of 1789. Chapter 3 is devoted to a discussion of the origins of English capitalism but moves away from an exclusive preoccupation with England. Chapter 4 treats the capitalist revolutions in Holland, England and France. It explains why bourgeois revolutions were critical to the further development of capitalism in Europe. They transformed the early modern state into an explicitly capitalist entity. Contrary to the view that the merchant capitalism of early modern Holland remained dependent on the feudal mode of production, we argue that not only did Holland develop an authentic agricultural capitalism, it also experienced a capitalist revolution. Too much of the necessarily comparative historical analysis of the origins of capitalism has led to insufficiently grounded and too hasty generalization from particular historical situations, usually European. Being at least roughly chronological, the early chapters of this book are necessarily focused on European history. However, the later discussions of capitalist transitions beyond the West European core – in Scotland, the United States, Prussia, Japan, Russia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and beyond – are anticipated in the non-economistic and non-Eurocentric emphasis of the early chapters. In this wider framework, comparative historical analysis is indispensable. As Terence Byres, who has done so much to make the comparative method in studying capitalism more authentically universal, suggests, ‘it is in a comparative perspective that one may reach for possible lines of causality. Comparison has the power to widen the range of possible hypotheses. Comparison can … prevent analytical closure … by keeping one alive to … diversity and historical contingency ….’9 The transitions considered in the first four chapters, as well as that in the United States, are regarded as instances of ‘capitalism from below’, originating among small-scale producers. The fifth chapter focuses particularly on the role of the state where the uneven development of capitalism elicited a response in the form of combined or state-directed capitalisms. It also discusses the role of the state in the fostering of colonialism and slavery, which were critical to overcoming the global marginality of the capitalist West and enabling it to impose itself politically, and eventually economiheller maintext.indd 8 6/7/2011 11:50:54 AM introduction: problems and methods 9 cally, over so much of the world, inhibiting capitalist development there. The final two chapters complete the narrative by discussing capital’s entry into manufacturing during the Industrial Revolution and by looking at the significance of capitalism in the context of world history. Though vulgar technological determinism regards the Industrial Revolution as decisive to the rise of the West, it was much less so than the birth of capitalism in the sixteenth century. Its full productive power could only reveal itself thanks to the slow accumulation of capital which began three centuries earlier. The final chapter completes the widening of the focus away from Western Europe and England to the broader context of Eurasian and global history, returning to the question of Eurocentrism as well as considering the future prospects of capitalism. the argument The overall argument of the work is a fourfold one: that capitalist development was drawn out over a long period, three centuries and counting; that class struggle and changes in the relations of production were historically decisive in their emergence and evolution; that home and world markets developed simultaneously; and that the territorial state was, and remains, an integral component of capitalism. In the first place, the emergence of capitalism as an apparently self-sustaining ‘economic’ system, separated from politics, was the consequence of a centuries-long process in which, pace Brenner, political coercion played a major role. Autonomous competitive markets only emerged after a long apprenticeship under the protection of the state. Second, the class struggle between feudal landlords and urban and rural producers in the late Middle Ages was crucial to the decline of the feudal mode of production in the West in contrast to the fate of feudalism in states located elsewhere. Socially and economically ambitious, the upper stratum of this group of small-scale producers played the key role in the development of capitalism from the late fifteenth century. It was this proto-capitalist element which was critically important to the emergence of agrarian capitalism and the initial revolutionizing of the means of production in manufacture in a capitalist direction. But class struggle did not cease in the aftermath of the late medieval uprisings, as Brenner would have it. Rather it proved critical to the further development of the capitalist mode of production in the early modern period. The small producers challenged landlord power when necessary and heller maintext.indd 9 6/7/2011 11:50:54 AM 16 the birth o f capitalism from feudal or tributary societies to capitalism. This account is rather a histoire raisonée or critical history. This is a type of historical writing that originated in the early modern epoch in which as much or more emphasis was placed on reflection and commentary on the meaning of history as on the facts themselves. It focuses on reviewing the different ways that Marxist scholars have attempted to explain and theorize the transition. As such it has as much to do with theory or political economy as it does with history. But such a history, although preoccupied with theory and comparison, must be written with ongoing reference to the concrete particulars of history, and especially the findings of contemporary historical research. Marx’s approach to the relationship between the abstractions of theory and the concrete particulars of history is outlined in an important passage in the third volume of Capital in which he delineates the relationship between the mode of production as the independent variable and the dependent variables of class and the realm of politics. Despite the apparent determinate role of the mode of production, Marx insists on the role of specific historic circumstances which theory must take into account: It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers – a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity – which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis – the same from the standpoint of its main conditions – due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc., from showing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances.17 Concrete historical references were an intrinsic feature even of Marx’s most theoretical works of economic analysis. The abstractions of theory could only prove themselves by being tested and applied to the concrete details of history. Engels described Marx’s approach in the following way: The critique of economics could … be exercised in two ways: heller maintext.indd 16 6/7/2011 11:50:54 AM introduction: problems and methods 17 historically or logically. … History moves often in leaps and bounds and in a zigzag line, and as this would have to be followed throughout, it would mean not only that a considerable amount of material of slight importance would have to be included, but also that the train of thought would frequently have to be interrupted; it would, moreover, be impossible to write the history of economy without that of bourgeois society, and the task would thus become immense, because of the absence of all preliminary studies. The logical method of approach was therefore the only suitable one. This, however, is indeed nothing but the historical method, only stripped of the historical form and diverting chance occurrences. … [W]ith this method the logical exposition need by no means be confined to the purely abstract sphere. On the contrary, it requires historical illustration and continuous contact with reality.18 Marx’s conception of capitalism and its chief elements was rooted or immanent in historical development and cannot be understood apart from it. Thus the categories that constitute capitalist commodities – use value, competitive markets, money, exchange value and value, private property, capital and abstract and concrete labour – not only have a history, they emerge in it, from it. Moreover, such concepts as value or abstract labour have a real social existence. On the other hand, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, Marx was preoccupied with analyzing these concepts in order to reveal the logic of capitalist accumulation. Of necessity, the historic origins of such concepts were of secondary concern to him, if only because of a want of sufficient time or available scholarly material. For us, who look forward to the unravelling of these capitalist commodity categories and the beginning of a new historical epoch, the development of these notions out of the concrete circumstances of early modern history is of central interest.19 Given that we are concerned not with an established mode of production but with the transition from one to another, we must be even more mindful of history’s concreteness. On the other hand, it is also important to not let that overwhelm the need for theorizing about history. Students of Marxism will recall the famous debate between the celebrated English historian Edward P. Thompson and the Marxist theoretician and historian Perry Anderson in the late 1970s. While Anderson defended the need to bring theory to bear on history, Thompson denounced this as overly schematic, as forcing a structure on the past based on the arbitrary imposition of ill-fitting heller maintext.indd 17 6/7/2011 11:50:54 AM 18 the birth o f capitalism Marxist concepts.20 Such concepts seemed to Thompson to contradict the historian’s commitment to the concrete as revealed in the primary sources, to a respect for narrative and to the contingency of historical outcomes, none of which ought to be surrendered lightly. Thompson’s admonitions in this regard are worth bearing in mind. Indeed, it is essential to admit from the beginning that theory can never completely grasp the complexity of the past. On the other hand, it is important to try to do so, as Anderson suggests, if only to better comprehend the facts of the past, and particularly those which are pertinent to the historical problem at hand. The concrete facts of historical narrative ought properly to be illuminated by a sense of the theory that stands behind them, and vice versa. Thompson and Anderson also had another disagreement relevant for us. In producing what is perhaps the masterpiece of Marxist historiography, The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson may be excused for perhaps paying too much attention to historical agents, men and women and their class consciousness, as against the objective realities of the mode of production and the social relations of production. As Ellen Wood has shown, he had his reasons for doing so: namely, to combat those who would deny the agency and even the existence of such a class.21 On the other hand, Thompson’s emphasis on consciousness and preoccupation with the complex tissue of working-class experience undoubtedly gave license to others to abandon notions of class, mode of production and surplus value altogether, and to take the ‘cultural turn’ into a fetishized world of discourse and idealist mystification.22 Thompson cannot be blamed for the deviations of epigones who abandoned Marxism in the age of neoliberalism, and it is for us to reaffirm our commitment to the historical force of consciousness and ideology. But from a Marxist perspective the social and economic aspects of history remain fundamental. Historical explanation certainly depends on the degree to which the political and cultural is convincingly linked to the social and economic, and the extent to which immediate events are tied to more enduring long-term factors. Revolutions, for example, need to be understood in political and cultural terms which enjoy a certain autonomy and cannot be reduced to the social and economic. Yet the challenge for historians is to try to grasp the ties between these different levels of social existence. In any case our project demands that we take our distance from an overly cultural approach to history which, moreover, shies away from comparison, abstraction, heller maintext.indd 18 6/7/2011 11:50:54 AM introduction: problems and methods 19 generalization and sense of structure, by invoking the overriding importance of subjective experience, which is necessarily various. Thompson likewise cannot be faulted for the sins of social history defined as history from below, another academically fashionable approach to history. Nonetheless he, like other British Marxist historians, gave license to an approach privileging the study of workers, plebeians and peasants. This was understandable given the previous neglect of the role of the people in history. But this opened the way to an approach which ignored the study of the political and economic opposition between workers and peasants on the one hand, and landlords and capitalists on the other, in favour of a one-sided preoccupation with the lower orders. The relationship between opposed classes must be the focus of serious study of the origins and dynamics of capitalism. Moreover, class conflict is always resolved at the level of political struggle and the control of the state. Indeed, the doings of the upper class must always be borne in mind when studying history or practicing politics. It is the dynamic of class struggle which must be the focal point of a Marxist approach to history, and especially the study of the origins and development of capitalism. The structural Marxism of Louis Althusser was Thompson’s particular bête noire. It was the epitome of what Thompson regarded as a schematic, a priori and overly theoretical approach to history based on the concept of the mode of production, which was the special target of his ire. Yet Althusser himself had insisted on the distinction between a mode of production and a social formation as a way of getting away from an overly mechanical and dogmatic understanding of historical process. According to the latter, the mode of production could not be found in the real world but was rather an abstraction from it. What did exist historically were social formations. While one mode of production might predominate, such a social formation might contain several coexisting modes of production, or fragments of such modes which might be out of phase with one another.23 This formulation makes sense in terms of apprehending the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Contrary to the views of non-Marxists, and even some Marxists, historical analysis requires a dialectical or relational understanding of the historical process. Methodological individualism and notions of causation based on the isolation of independent and dependent variables were not incorrect methods. They were merely insufficient. Competitive markets, for example, may determine the success or failure of individual entrepreneurs. But the historical constitution of heller maintext.indd 19 6/7/2011 11:50:54 AM 20 the birth o f capitalism markets is not only an economic process but also a political, social and cultural one. Explaining their emergence requires understanding the capitalist mode of production as a totality whose constituent parts and overall development cannot be grasped except through an appreciation of their dynamic tension and ongoing interaction with one another. This is obvious with regard to class relations but is also necessary with respect to understanding the relationship between value and capital, markets and class struggle, the concrete and the abstract and the base and superstructure. caPItalIsm and World hIstory Studying capitalism’s origins invariably must lead to differentiating European from non-European societies. No one can deny that capitalism took permanent root first in Western Europe in the sixteenth century, and where it took root – England, Holland, northern France, northwest Germany – it accelerated economic growth. Translated into political and military power, capitalism made it possible for the European states to dominate the rest of the world from the end of the eighteenth century onward. As such it endowed Europe with a deep sense of superiority over other cultures and civilizations. It is this Eurocentric perspective which has increasingly been challenged in recent decades. Eurocentrism and the cultural arrogance that goes with it certainly need to be confronted, and we shall do that. Attention has already been drawn to how the economic superiority of Europe’s capitalism became evident much later than most historians think it did. But in contesting Eurocentrism some scholars, including Jack Goody and John Hobson have tried to make light of the historical significance of this eventual economic superiority of the capitalist mode of production as compared to the performance of other non-capitalist societies like traditional China and Japan.24 In my view such a denial is quixotic. We can no more dispute the higher productivity of capitalist relations of production than we can repudiate the historic facts of European conquest of the rest of the world. One of the most convincing attempts to contextualize the rise of capitalism within the context of world history was made by the late British revolutionary Marxist Chris Harman.25 Harman insisted that capitalism was not the result of some special Western European quality or development. The forces of production have been cumulatively developing in Europe, Asia and Africa for centuries, and tendencies toward capitalism emerged in many places. For continheller maintext.indd 20 6/7/2011 11:50:54 AM introduction: problems and methods 21 gent historical reasons such tendencies culminated earlier in Western Europe than elsewhere, and once they did, further movement toward capitalism outside Europe was frustrated after capitalism triggered European imperialism. From the perspective of the twenty-first century in which non-European poles of development have emerged, the development of capitalism first in Europe is part of a much longer and yet unconcluded historical process. During the Middle Ages and the early modern period there was considerable progress in agricultural and manufacturing techniques in India and especially China. The Middle East, too, saw improvement. In the case of all three regions merchants and craftspeople played an important role. But in the case of China and the Middle East the entrenched power of landed elites, reinforced sooner or later by state bureaucracies, discouraged merchants and craftspeople from investing in the cumulative development of the means of production. This was ultimately the case in India too. In a noteworthy if controversial break from stereotypical Western views of an unchanging India, Harman underlines the recurrent possibilities for the breakthrough of capitalist tendencies in India in the face of the repeated breakdowns of its dynastic state system. In the Middle Ages Western Europe also saw the adoption of new methods of farming and manufacture, many of which were in fact imported from China, India and the Middle East. Harman concludes that in that epoch Western Europe was an economic backwater compared with much of the rest of Eurasia. In any event in terms of the development of the forces of production the whole of Eurasia shared a common experience. It can parenthetically be added that if we compare the most productive areas of Europe and Asia, as late as the eighteenth century the growth of fixed capital and levels of productivity and gross domestic product per capita were approximately similar. What ultimately distinguished Western Europe from the rest of the Eurasian continent, according to Harman, was its distinctive political and social evolution. The relative economic backwardness of northwest Europe gave it a weak and fragmented superstructure which favored the flowering of capitalist tendencies more than in the rest of Eurasia. In the context of this political decentralization what became notable was the relative strength of the producer classes. Serfs may have been tied to the land but they largely controlled the processes of production. Merchants and craftspeople were able to achieve a greater degree of autonomy from kings and feudal lords through the development of town charters and liberties. More heller maintext.indd 21 6/7/2011 11:50:54 AM 22 the birth o f capitalism than the peasants, urban merchants and craftspeople developed an independent productive base and an interest in its expansion and improvement. The end of the Middle Ages saw a re-consolidation of political authority throughout Eurasia. But in the case of Western Europe the centralized states that did emerge were able to exercise less control than their counterparts elsewhere in protecting the class rule of the landed elites. Indeed, the fourteenthand fifteenth-century economic and social crisis in Western Europe had enhanced the social freedom of the productive classes. In particular the transformations of that period opened the way for the increasing employment of wage labour by merchants and rich peasants on a scale which distinguished Western Europe from the rest of the world. Ultimately Western Europeans used the increasing economic power which accrued from the development of capitalism to block whatever indigenous capitalist tendencies existed in the rest of the world. In this light, Eurasia as a whole shared a common development of the forces of production in the pre-capitalist period. Capitalist tendencies were present not only in Western Europe but in China, India and the Middle East. Historic contingencies – political and social – determined that capitalism emerged first in Europe and not Asia. Among those contingencies we would underscore the strength of the state in Asia, and later the effects of foreign intrusion including Western colonialism and imperialism in blocking capitalist development. The restructuring of social and political relations through war and revolution in the twentieth century has produced a model of capitalist accumulation in China and East Asia which is now outcompeting that of the West.26 The same historic contingency, some argue, could lead in the twenty-first century to the overshadowing of European and American capitalism by a still more successful version in the East. Presumably there are some in Asia who look forward at long last to the day when the capitalist East will trump the capitalist West. There is no reason to believe that such an Asian capitalism would benefit humanity as a whole any more than that of the West. In fact the aspiration to replace Eurocentrism with some kind of Asian hegemony will likely run up against the same multiple contradictions of intensifying class conflict, crisis of peak oil, ecological crisis and insufficient demand in the world economy.27 heller maintext.indd 22 6/7/2011 11:50:55 AM 1 the declIne of feudalIsm This chapter reviews the debates on the decline of feudalism and origins of capitalism, beginning with the foundational exchange between Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezy. The two differed primarily over whether an external prime mover, namely the development of commerce with the Mediterranean and the Middle East, or factors internal to feudalism caused the decline of this mode of production. Sweezy argued that commerce overseas served as an external prime mover which undermined feudalism. Dobb and others, including the medievalist Rodney Hilton and the Japanese historian Kohachiro Takahashi, argued that an internal prime mover – the crisis of the feudal mode of production – caused the decline. Meanwhile Eric Hobsbawm, another participant in the debate, insisted that changes in Europe had to be seen in terms of uneven development on a global scale. The decline of feudalism and advance toward capitalism came about through a series of crises that saw previously developed areas of Europe and the rest of the world regress while other regions forged ahead. England emerged at the forefront of this movement. In the original debate class struggles were recognized as important in feudalism’s decline. Subsequent argument centred on Brenner’s contention that these class struggles determined not only the decline of feudalism, but the genesis of capitalism. In England, according to Brenner, such conflicts paradoxically led to serfdom’s decline but also the landlords’ ongoing grip on the land. In the sixteenth century the latter initiated agrarian capitalism by forcing the better-off among the cautious peasantry to take up competitive leases. Based on the work of Guy Bois, Terence Byres and Chris Harman, we reject Brenner’s argument. Far from being conservative, petty producers and not landlords took the lead in not only dismantling feudalism, but initiating capitalism through their ongoing political and social struggles and their economic enterprise. In accord with a forces of production approach, furthermore, we insist that the economic and political capacity of this class of proto-capitalists has to be understood in terms of the previous development of the forces of production during the Middle Ages. 23 heller maintext.indd 23 6/7/2011 11:50:55 AM 24 the birth o f capitalism Perry Anderson’s account of the role of the state shapes our view as well. He points out that faced with revolt from below, the only way that class society survived was through the building-up of the territorial state. Despite its feudal framework the early modern state provided an essential container for the emergence of capitalism. Dobb and Brenner’s views of the transition are the focal points of this chapter. Yet their viewpoint is marred by an unfortunate economism and in the latter’s case a class determinism. In response we use the work of Hobsbawm, Anderson and Harman to provide a more dialectical view of the transition from feudalism. Hobsbawm’s sense of unequal development, Anderson’s view of the dual class character of the emerging territorial state and Harman’s notion of social class as defined economically but also culturally and politically help to provide this more dialectical sense. These debates cover the chief issues relating to the transition from feudalism, and form the essential basis for understanding debates discussed later in the text. dobb’s oPenIng gambIt Maurice Dobb was a don at Cambridge throughout his career. He was an economist by training, and founded the discipline of Marxist political economy in Britain. He also helped to mentor a strong left-wing student movement during the 1930s. As a communist he was more or less isolated from other academics especially in his own discipline, though the development economist and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen has recently written that ‘he was undoubtedly one of the outstanding political economists of this [twentieth] century.’1 Dobb justified his intrusion into history by suggesting that economists could put interesting questions to historical data; that the facts of concrete history could be illuminated by economic theory. At the same time he argued that economic analysis makes sense and is fruitful only if tied to the study of historical development.2 His Studies in the Development of Capitalism, published immediately after the Second World War, was based on thorough knowledge of the then existing historiography on the decline of English feudalism and emergence of capitalism. Dobb based his approach to the transition from feudalism to capitalism on Marx’s notion of the mode of production.3 While he recognized that one mode of production dominated a given epoch, he also accepted that elements of other modes of production could coexist with the dominant mode.4 In the passage from the feudal heller maintext.indd 24 6/7/2011 11:50:55 AM the decline o f feudalism 25 mode of production to the capitalist mode, Dobb singled out three decisive moments – the crisis of feudalism in the fourteenth century, the beginning of capitalism in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution.5 The decline of feudalism and start of capitalism are separated by at least two centuries. The capitalist mode proper dates from the latter half of the sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century, when capital began to penetrate production to a considerable degree.6 Modern discussions of feudalism have been plagued by longdrawn-out controversies over its conceptualization. These disputes have centred on whether feudalism should be thought of in essentially political and legal or socio-economic terms.7 As a Marxist Dobb adopted the third perspective while trying not to not lose sight of the political. According to him, the feudal mode is defined as the extra-economic extraction by overlords of rents or services from a class of subsistence producers. The peasant producers largely control the process of production but are not legally free. Feudalism and serfdom are synonymous.8 The rise of the political and economic autonomy of the corporate towns, followed immediately by the economic decline of the fourteenth century, marked the crisis of the feudal mode, which was deeply shaken and thereafter continued to weaken. According to Dobb, towns had some part in the decline of feudalism, playing a role in the late medieval revolts, providing refuges to runaway serfs and serving as oases of freedom.9 But the confrontation between peasants and landlords in the countryside was the main arena of struggle. At the end of the Middle Ages serfdom had vanished while medieval forms of government and the class power of landlords lingered on in a kind of historical twilight. Though the peasantry as a class had grown stronger, they remained subject to manorial authority. The emerging class of hired labourers was subject to a good deal of coercion as a stratum which resorted to wage labour as a supplement to a livelihood still mainly drawn from subsistence farming.10 The merchant bourgeoisie became more powerful but cooperated for the most part with the landlords. The novel element lay among urban craftspeople and well-to-do and middling peasants, whose particular mode of production had become independent of feudalism. They were petty producers who were not yet capitalists, but certainly contained a potential to become so, or who began to come under the external influence of capital.11 In Dobb’s conception it was this petty mode of production which predominated economically in the two hundred heller maintext.indd 25 6/7/2011 11:50:55 AM 32 the birth o f capitalism accord an autonomous structural place to urban production and exchange. Merrington completed his argument about towns and trade being intrinsic components of feudalism rather than external capitalist forces working to undermine it by denying them any role in the emergence of capitalism. For merchant capital did not create surplus value, it only redistributed it. While it played a key role in primitive accumulation, it could not be a source of a permanent selfreproducing accumulation.49 For that to occur the extension of the market in the territorial state and the emergence of agrarian capitalism were necessary, and when they did emerge, urban merchant capital was reduced to a declining sphere of operations.50 Merrington’s arguments were a powerful reinforcement of the role of class struggle and the internal logic of feudalism’s decline, but they may have overstated the imbrication of towns in feudalism. He overlooked three aspects of their role in its decline. First, the towns served as a potential or actual refuge for the subject rural population, as Dobb pointed out. Second, urban markets strengthened social and political links between rural producers. Finally, as Merrington himself noted, merchant capital played a role in primitive accumulation which was a necessary if not sufficient condition for the development of the capitalist mode of production: that is, the eventual entry of capital into the productive process itself. These aspects of the role of towns and trade could not be so easily dismissed, and as we shall see below, later accounts came to see class struggle and trade as joint factors in the rise of capitalism. Indeed, we shall argue that while exchange helps to maintain feudal relations of production, once capitalist relations are in place it is indispensable to the realization process. uneven develoPment Takahashi had pointed to the need to broaden the discussion on feudalism to include Continental Europe and Japan. This was part of a general trend in Marxism to extend the concept of feudalism in analyzing non-European pre-capitalist societies, rather than employing the problematical and Eurocentric concepts of communal and Asiatic modes of production. Feudalism, at least after Hilton’s intervention, was seen as a progressive mode capable of evolving toward capitalism, whereas the other two categories were seen as stagnant. In a deceptively simple contribution, Eric Hobsbawm helped to free Marxist understandings from the problems associated with heller maintext.indd 32 6/7/2011 11:50:55 AM the decline o f feudalism 33 notions of Asiatic and communal modes of production, and reconnected them with ideas about uneven and combined development. Hobsbawm unreservedly admitted that the forces making for economic development in Europe were also present elsewhere in the world. Japanese feudalism, in particular, resembled the European variant closely, and it was conceivable that capitalism could have emerged there independently of European influence. In his view the intrusion of European imperialism ruptured an authentically endogenous process. Having raised the possibility of non-European forms of capitalism, Hobsbawm nonetheless insisted that the triumph of capitalism in Europe was unique: ‘there is no getting round the fact that the transition from feudalism is, on a world scale, a case of highly uneven development’.51 We should note that the conception of uneven development dates back at least to Marx’s Grundrisse (1857–58), where unevenness represents the condition for a transition from one declining mode of production to another rising and more progressive mode. Moreover uneven development is a fundamental feature of the capitalist form of development. Its importance throughout the process of capitalist development cannot be overstated, and is key to understanding the contemporary capitalist crisis.52 With respect to uneven development in Western Europe, according to Hobsbawm the crisis of feudalism involved the most advanced sectors of bourgeois development within Western Europe as well: ‘the interesting thing about the 14th century crisis … is not only the collapse of large-scale feudal demesne agriculture, but also that of the Italian and Flemish textile industries. … England advances; but the much greater Italy and Flanders never recover.’53 Unevenness characterized not only the crisis of feudalism but also the emergence of capitalism itself. Overall European development from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries was marked by repeated crises in which regression in one place allowed progress elsewhere. West European advance came directly at the expense of Eastern Europe and Asia, Africa and Latin America. The process of West European transition entailed turning other areas into dependent economies and colonies. Seizing resources from advanced areas or later on from colonized regions became an intrinsic feature of West European development. In other words, the emergence of capitalism in Europe has to be understood in terms of an ongoing world-wide process of appropriation based on uneven development both within and outside Europe. Hobsbawm concludes that ‘the net effect of European capitalism was to divide the world ever more sharply into heller maintext.indd 33 6/7/2011 11:50:55 AM 34 the birth o f capitalism two sectors: the “developed” and the “under-developed” countries, in other words the exploiting and the exploited.’54 Hobsbawm’s conception of the transition is one in which unevenness plays a central part. Gain in one place is invariably at the expense of other places, even those that were initially more developed.55 Hobsbawm’s sense of the dialectical quality and the unevenness of the process of transition is a dazzling insight, representing a significant contribution to the transition debate whose importance has even now been insufficiently acknowledged. the neW left takes over Hilton’s editing and republication of the 1950s transition debate (in 1976) was the consequence of the revival of the dispute in the 1960s. But the political context was quite different. Whereas the earlier dispute had unfolded during the darkest days of the Cold War, its republication took place during the revolutionary ferment of the 1960s and 1970s. Capitalism was deeply challenged by the Vietnam War, which sparked global revolt including revolutionary upheavals in France and Italy. Anti-imperialist revolution reached its zenith in the under-developed countries in the 1970s. In these years Marxist historical writing, especially as a result of the influence of the British Marxist historians, Thompson, Hill, Hobsbawm and Hilton, enjoyed a considerable vogue. Against this background Brenner, Anderson and Wallerstein published their important contributions to the transition debate. Both Brenner and Anderson assumed a Eurocentric posture. While Brenner was adamantly Eurocentric, Anderson at least made an attempt to widen the discussion of feudalism beyond Europe by including Japan, as we shall see. But Anderson’s contention that the inheritance of Rome was essential to the existence of feudalism in the first place and to the eventual crystallization of the capitalist notion of private property definitively placed him in the Eurocentric camp.56 Meanwhile Wallerstein adopted what he called a worldsystems approach, which attempted to view the development of European capitalism from a perspective which included the underdeveloped countries. With the exception of Takahashi’s brief plea for a perspective beyond Europe, endorsed and elaborated through his invocation of uneven and combined development by Hobsbawm, the earlier phase of discussion of the transition question had scarcely touched on the non-European world. The fact that Anderson, and especially Wallerstein, found it incumbent on them to discuss heller maintext.indd 34 6/7/2011 11:50:55 AM the decline o f feudalism 35 capitalist origins in a non-European context undoubtedly reflects the growing impact of Asia, Africa and Latin America on Western scholarship in the radical 1960s and 1970s. JaPanese feudalIsm Hilton’s republication of the original transition debate itself inspired a broadening of the discussion. A French translation of the English text was published by the radical publisher François Maspero (1977) alongside a companion volume which included an extensive discussion of the transition in Japan by Takahashi.57 Like many other scholars, Takahashi believed that Japanese feudalism closely approximated that of the West, and that like the Western version, its transition to capitalism was a matter of internal evolution, not, as was usually assumed of non-European cases, due to an external prime mover, in this case Western imperialism. The Meiji Restoration, or so-called capitalist revolution from above, may have been inspired by the threat from the West. However, Takahashi argued, its possibility and form were determined by the internal evolution of Japanese feudalism. The historical priority of Western capitalism could not be gainsaid, argued Takahashi, but its uniqueness, as argued by Hobsbawm, could. Takahashi notably attributed the top-down nature of Japanese capitalism to the resilience of its feudalism. While capitalism was breaking through in the West, the feudal regime consolidated or reconsolidated itself as the Tokugawa Shogunate in the seventeenth century on the basis of extremely heavy rents-in-kind and personal serfdom. The aspirations of the petty producers in Japan were crushed by the weight of feudal rent and the development of usury. On the other hand, these burdens on the peasants stimulated increased commercialization of the surplus. As a result, protocapitalist manufacturing and agriculture, including some wage labour directed by small manufacturers and middle peasants, emerged in the countryside prior to the opening of Japan to the West. On the other hand, Takahashi stressed the dominant economic power of the urban merchants and financiers, who operated on the basis of their close dependency on the feudal state and great landlord magnates. Centralized collection of revenue made possible a high degree of commercialization and urbanization as well as an extreme level of peasant exploitation. On the eve of the Meiji Restoration, middle peasants and small manufacturers began to enter into opposition to the merchant and financial monopolists tied to feudal magnates in a way reminiscent of the heller maintext.indd 35 6/7/2011 11:50:55 AM 36 the birth o f capitalism revolutions in England and France. Over-exploitation by landlords led to increasing misery and ultimately population decline. The country fell into an increasingly severe demographic and economic crisis which set the stage for the overthrow of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Yet Japanese feudalism proved much more durable than that of the states of the West, and its resilience fundamentally determined the nature of the capitalism that did emerge. Takahashi’s insistence on the profundity of the economic and demographic crisis and the polarization of Japanese society between the proto-capitalist and peasant opposition, on the one hand, and the resistance of its feudal and big merchant supporters on the other, has been confirmed overall by subsequent research. Legal serfdom in the sense of personal dependence appears to have been less prevalent than in medieval Europe, although economic exploitation was at least as severe. In fact, though initial advances made early Tokugawa Japan compare favourably with France under the Ancien Régime, over-exploitation created food shortages, peasant revolts and population decline. They engulfed the Shogunate in the last decades of its existence. Popular and proto-capitalist revolt proved essential to catalyzing a modernizing political elite to dismantle the institutions of the feudal regime while preserving the essence of landlord power over the peasantry. But revolt from below fundamentally failed to transform the feudal Japanese social and political order.58 Decentralized military power was broken but landlords continued to control their tenants socially and economically. The political and economic freedom of the bulk of producers remained fundamentally constrained. As a consequence it was the state rather than the petty producers that was to take the lead in capitalist development. For Takahashi, contrary to Eurocentric prejudice, the intrusion of the West was merely a catalyst which set off what was already the internal evolution of Japan toward capitalism. But despite Takahashi’s analysis Eurocentrism reasserted itself in a sophisticated and nuanced way through the intervention of Perry Anderson. Anderson dealt with Japanese feudalism in a long note or appendix added to his Lineages of the Absolutist State.59 He agreed with Takahashi that feudalism set the stage for a capitalist take-off and that the parallels between Japanese and Western feudalism were striking. Anderson underscored the gains in the productivity of Japanese feudal agriculture in the seventeenth century. The eighteenth century, while less dynamic, was still marked by increased commercialization, including the spread of cash crops like sugar, cotton, tea, indigo and tobacco. The urban merchant class expanded heller maintext.indd 36 6/7/2011 11:50:55 AM the decline o f feudalism 37 and became more influential while the cities grew prodigiously. Educational and literacy levels were as high as or higher than in the West. Indeed, the potential for capitalist development once a breakthrough occurred was enormous. However, Anderson rejects Takahashi’s suggestion that Japan could have liquidated feudalism through the power of its own internal contradictions. An external prime mover was required, which arrived with the abrupt intrusion of American imperialism. For, Anderson argues, although the conspicuous consumption of the elites set the stage for a major fiscal and economic crisis by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Shogunate was not in danger of being overthrown from within. The isolation of Japan from the world market fundamentally blocked its evolution from feudalism toward capitalism. Citing Lenin, Anderson stressed that no country became capitalist without linking itself to the global market, a fundamental theme in Anderson’s broader narrative of the absolutist state mediating the historical transitional phase between the crisis of feudalism and the rise of capitalism. It was the intrusion of Western trade following the Commodore Perry’s expedition that destabilized the feudal regime and led to the Meiji Restoration. Though this is hardly definitive proof of Anderson’s Eurocentric arguments, late Tokugawa Japan, though racked by internal contradictions, did not explode of itself. Eurocentrism aside, however, Anderson’s view of Japan has wider theoretical resonances. They suggest that between Dobb’s internal prime mover and Sweezy’s external prime mover, Anderson favours the latter. Or better, he is arguing that for capitalism to develop, connections to the world market and an appropriate set of social relations of production are both necessary. Anderson’s is a fundamentally dialectical view of capitalist origins. This Marxist methodology is manifest likewise in his overall view of the relationship between the relations of production and trade, and above all in his discussion of the origins of the state. As we shall see below, the latter is seen simultaneously as the last redoubt of feudalism and the indispensable framework for the development of capitalism. As for the Japanese example, it makes evident that the commercial and economic potential of the feudal mode of production in general needs to be taken into account more than it has been.60 On the other hand, it also suggests that feudal territorial division, lack of secure property rights, and above all, isolation from world trade may block the further evolution of merchant capitalism and a transition to capitalism. heller maintext.indd 37 6/7/2011 11:50:55 AM 38 the birth o f capitalism the last ramPart of feudalIsm Anderson’s Lineages of the Absolutist State reflected extraordinary mastery of the historiography of the transition. Anderson was, of course, the editor of the New Left Review, the influential journal of the English-speaking left intelligentsia. His interest in the transition question is but one of an incredible range of political and cultural interests, and his theoretical insight and erudition have arguably made him the leading Marxist intellectual of this generation. As we have noted, Anderson conceded the homology between European and Japanese feudalism. Once opened to the global market Japan rapidly made the transition to capitalism. But, for Anderson, only Western European feudalism could have created capitalism. Anderson’s view of feudalism and its demise combines an emphasis on class struggle with recognition of the importance of exchange relations. The emergence of the territorial state and the global market both provided indispensable foundations for capitalism. In feudalism the peasant producer was tied to the land by being legally bound to the soil as a serf. Agrarian property was privately controlled by a class of feudal lords who extracted a surplus in the form of rent from peasants by political-legal or extraeconomic coercion.61 These social relations provided the setting for a dramatic increase in productivity during the High Middle Ages.62 In contrast to Dobb and Hilton, however, Anderson stresses the objective exhaustion of the possibility of further advances in the forces of production as the source of the feudal crisis, rather than over-exploitation of the producers. Population increased, forcing the clearing of increasingly marginal land, while necessary investments in improving the productivity of existing tillage were not undertaken.63 The subsequent economic crisis provoked widespread peasant revolts which were everywhere defeated in the short term. In the longer run the income and wages of the peasantry improved and serfdom declined.64 Anderson also insisted, more than any other previous participant in the debate save Sweezy, on the important role of the towns to this outcome. Urban commercial networks tended to destabilize feudal social relations. Towns served as potential refuges for runaway serfs as well as allies in peasant revolts. Indeed, the most significant rural revolts were located close to towns.65 In the long term the noble lords’ need for commodities produced in the towns led them to commute labour services into money rents and to lease out demesne to peasant tenants. In England in the fifteenth century serfdom heller maintext.indd 38 6/7/2011 11:50:55 AM the decline o f feudalism 39 virtually disappeared and peasant incomes rose. Social differentiation increased in the villages, as a stratum of rich peasants emerged at the top and wage labour spread in the countryside. Anderson directly addressed the Dobb–Sweezy debate in a long footnote in the opening chapter of his Lineages of the Absolutist State.66 For him it was not a case of choosing between rural social relations of production and commercial-trade relations but of their relative weight and dialectical inter-relationship. Indeed, based on Merrington, Anderson acknowledged that trade was intrinsic to the feudal mode.67 Dobb had already suggested that the early modern state was above all designed to defend the nobility, and Anderson provided a conclusive demonstration of this thesis. The end of serfdom did not bring feudalism to an end. The consolidation of the territorial monarchies at the end of the Middle Ages in fact represented ‘a redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination, designed to clamp the peasant masses back into their traditional social position’.68 The class power of the nobility, which was put in question as a result of the disappearance of serfdom, was displaced upwards and centralized into the hands of the new territorial monarchies, which became the principal instruments for the maintenance of noble domination over the peasantry. Moreover, in so far as nobles blocked the emergence of a free market in land and peasants retained access to their means of subsistence, feudal relations persisted.69 Nonetheless, in England and elsewhere in Western Europe the emergence of the territorial state created a space essential for the further progression of the urban-based bourgeoisie. In the medieval period political and economic control had been combined. With the appearance of the territorial state in the early modern period, political power began to be separated from immediate control over the economy, allowing capitalist forces to emerge. The political order remained feudal while society under its aegis became more bourgeois.70 Anderson sees the emerging territorial state as having a dual determination: the threat of peasant unrest, unspokenly constitutive of the Absolutist State, was thus always conjoined with the pressure of mercantile or manufacturing capital within the Western economies as a whole, in moulding the contours of aristocratic class power in the new age.71 For all that the development of the territorial state bolstered feudalism, it also provided an enlarged political space within which capitalism heller maintext.indd 39 6/7/2011 11:50:55 AM 40 the birth o f capitalism could develop. In such a space lay the market. Just as Merrington saw the medieval market as intrinsic to the seigneurial regime, Anderson insists that the capitalist market was a creation of the territorial state and almost as much a political as an economic institution. Anderson’s insight into the role of the state is critical to understanding the transition. Moreover, like his formulation of the relationship between relations of production and those of exchange, one must underline the importance of the fact that he grasps the nature of the state in a dialectical way. He demonstrates that the state both saved feudalism and incubated capitalism within itself. It is within the state that the transition is possible in the first place. brenner and the late medIeval crIsIs Beginning with Dobb, scholars separated the period of the decline of feudalism from the period of the rise of capitalism. Dobb and Sweezy, chief protagonists in the initial debate, both acknowledged the existence of an intermediate period prior to the emergence of capitalism, in which a weakened feudalism gave greater freedom to petty producers prior to the emergence of capitalism. Moreover, most of the participants in the debate, while stressing one or another factor leading to the transition, nonetheless tended to acknowledge a multiplicity of causes. Dobb, Hilton and Anderson stressed the vital importance of class struggle in the decline of feudalism. But Brenner took the importance of agrarian class struggle a step further, arguing that as it unfolded in England in the late Middle Ages, it not only destroyed feudalism but created a path leading directly to the emergence of capitalism. In taking this view Brenner largely abolished the conceptual and chronological divide between the decline of feudalism and the origins of capitalism.72 Brenner is a historian at UCLA who began his scholarly career as a student of early modern England. With roots in a radical family, he became politically active in the 1960s in the Trotskyist movement in the United States and is currently an editor of a leading Marxist journal, Against the Current. While maintaining his interest in the transition problem, he has become recognized as a leading analyst of the current capitalist crisis through the publication of The Boom and the Bubble: The U.S. in the World Economy (2002).73 For his PhD he produced a magisterial thesis, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653, which while not bearing on the end of feudalism debate, proved important to the controversy on heller maintext.indd 40 6/7/2011 11:50:55 AM the decline o f feudalism 41 the English Revolution.74 It is a work founded on deep primary research. His conception of the transition, like that of most of those involved in the transition debate, is simply based on a close reading of the current historiography. His view of the transition question is informed theoretically by the influence of analytical Marxism, a school of thought which was prominent in the 1980s and to which Brenner subscribed. It has recently been shown that analytical philosophy as a whole was a product of the 1950s Cold War, which saw Anglo-American philosophy sever all ties with Continental philosophy, transforming itself into a politically disengaged professional discipline preoccupied with constituting a formal model of knowledge.75 Born in the midst of the waning of Marxism in the 1980s, analytical Marxism purported to salvage whatever could be saved by applying the same techniques of formal logic to Marxism. Committed to a positivist logic, this approach rejected a dialectical sense of totality, movement and contradiction to its own cost.76 Brenner’s view of the transition is fundamentally weakened by this constraining methodology. the east–West dIvIde Dobb and Hilton had already made the late medieval population collapse and ensuing class conflicts central to their conception of the crisis in England and elsewhere in Europe. In Brenner’s view such conflicts arose from a crisis of peasant accumulation, productivity and ultimately subsistence provoked by over-exploitation. Excessive landlord exploitation and the inherent conservatism of the peasant mode of production placed definite limits on the productivity of peasant agriculture. As Dobb and Hilton had argued, Brenner stressed that landlords used extra-economic coercion to extract more and more surplus from the producers. More originally he demonstrated the inherent economic limitations of the peasant economic mode within the constraints of the medieval manor. The economic objectives of peasants within the bounds of the manor were not to improve their holdings, maximize output or deepen their relation to the market, but rather to ensure the reproduction of the family unit. As a result a definite limit was imposed on economic growth. In the ensuing crisis the survival of the mass of producers was put into question. Following the demographic collapse of the fourteenth century, intense class struggles revolved around the issue of serfdom and the control of land. The outcome of these struggles heller maintext.indd 41 6/7/2011 11:50:55 AM 48 the birth o f capitalism the roots of capitalist origins. Whereas Brenner minimized social differentiation within the medieval peasantry, stressing its homogeneity as a class, Byres makes the differentiation of the peasant class the linchpin of his notion of capitalist development: So, rather than suggesting that it was the leases that brought about the necessary class formation … which is what Brenner appears to argue (that it was the lords who were the essential agents – that the causality ran from the lords), might one not suggest a causality running in quite the opposite direction: that it was the rich peasantry that forced the pace, rather than the landlords: that, indeed, one cannot grasp the nature of the eventual transition without reference to the differentiation of the peasantry?98 In the thirteenth century, if not before, the peasantry were internally divided between rich, middle and poor elements. Rich peasants had more livestock and land, and often worked for the lords as bailiffs, stewards and rent collectors, helping the lords maintain control of the bulk of the peasants. Contrary to Brenner’s notion of an essential equality among medieval peasants, the better-off peasants’ enforcement of legal-political control over the remainder of the peasantry on behalf of the nobility amounted to economic control over them. The power of the rich peasants increased during the thirteenth century as they were able to market part of their agricultural surplus and purchase the labour of poor peasants and incipient wage earners. Their ability to produce surpluses had been enhanced by previous gains in productivity or improvements in the forces of production. In the late medieval crisis their power grew alongside that of the rest of the peasantry in relation to the nobles, as rents and personal servitude declined and more land became available for purchase. The crisis reduced the numbers of poor peasants and wage earners, limiting the ability of better-off peasants at this stage to hire labour. It was the middle peasants whose numbers and incomes rose most notably during this period. But from the late fifteenth century onward it was rich peasants who came to the fore, benefiting in particular from the cheap labour increasingly available as a result of the demographic recovery. This was a process which occurred across the face of Western Europe but assumed decisive significance in England. As we have noted, Brenner stressed the offering of economic leases by landlords to prosperous farmers as integral to capitalist beginnings. But he said nothing about where the farmers heller maintext.indd 48 6/7/2011 11:50:55 AM the decline o f feudalism 49 able to take up such leases came from. According to Byres, such farmers were the product of previous social differentiation and especially the period of feudal disintegration. They then became the prime movers of sixteenth-century capitalism, which was based on the dispossession of a growing mass of peasants and their subjection to the emerging power of rural capital. This account seems to be consonant with Harman’s notion of the emergence of a class of rural proto-capitalists in the late medieval crisis in a position to command new forces of production. Byres, Harman and Bois do not underestimate the importance of class struggle to the decline of feudalism. They stress rather that the outcome of such struggles must be related to the level of development of the forces of production. In its turn, the level reached by the forces of production under the command of a given class determines the capacity of that class for leadership in class conflict.99 Brenner had seen the peasantry as more than willing to engage in class struggle against landlords in the late medieval crisis but also, being essentially peasants, unwilling thereafter to seize new economic possibilities opened by the decline of feudalism. Peasants engaged in market activity, but only in so far as did not endanger the subsistence family household. Only an upper stratum of this class was forced out of passivity by the imposition of competitive rents by the landlords at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It is the logic of accumulation imposed from the outside in the form of these competitive rents which initiates capitalism. Byres, expanding on Hilton’s view and opposing Brenner, sees the peasantry as socially combative and its upper stratum as the active base of an emerging capitalist class eager to seek opportunity in the market. Opportunity presented itself in the late medieval crisis with the disintegration of the restrictions of feudalism. Increasingly freed from the constraints of the decaying manor, rich peasants sought economic opportunity by acquiring access to more land, marketing increasing amounts of livestock and grain, and employing increasing amounts of wage labour. The enclosures of the sixteenth century transformed this impulse into capitalist accumulation. As a parenthesis to the above discussion we should note that the question of the role of the petty producers in capitalism has implications beyond their destiny in the late Middle Ages or sixteenth century in Europe. Peasant farmers and craftspeople did not disappear with the full emergence of capitalism, as is suggested by the above discussion. They have continued to be an important social group within Europe and in the rest of the world, constituting heller maintext.indd 49 6/7/2011 11:50:55 AM 50 the birth o f capitalism and reconstituting themselves right up to the present. Indeed, the present crisis of capitalist agriculture has led to the re-emergence of movements in many countries attempting to revive the peasantry as the basis for a sustainable agriculture. Hence the class nature of this group continues to be a matter of some political moment. Earlier analyses tended to view the peasantry from the perspective of capitalist or socialist modernization, in which they were regarded as a dated social anomaly. Ernesto Laclau argued in the 1970s, for example, that they form part of an archaic set of social relations which blocked the emergence of a fully developed capitalism in the under-developed countries and facilitated the export of surplus within global imperialism.100 On the other hand, Jairus Banaji, who was more sympathetic, argued that rural petty producers were really disguised proletarians even in the absence of a real accumulation of capital.101 In other words Banaji tries to rehabilitate the peasantry by reclassifying them as part of the proletarian class. Neither Laclau nor Banaji are able to perceive the peasantry in terms of the future viability of an enhanced subsistence economy. In any case in the light of our view of capitalism, which sees both wage labour and the ongoing entry of capital into production as indispensable components of the capitalist mode, Banaji’s view appears dubious under the constraints of imperialism. The role of such rural petty producers might be quite different in a socialist economy. In such circumstances a revived peasant economy could help to absorb the constantly expanding global lumpenproletariat and constitute one essential part of a sustainable agriculture. dIalectIcs of socIal relatIons As we have seen, the initial debate on the transition focused on whether the prime mover in the long decline of feudalism was longrange trade or factors internal to the feudal system. The outcome of the dispute was a nearly unanimous consensus that the exhaustion of feudalism from within, especially as the result of class struggle, was critical to its decline. The subsequent debate centred on Brenner’s view that class struggle alone was critical not only to feudalism’s decline but also to setting the stage for the beginning of capitalism. According to him, changes in the social relations of production unique to England, giving control of the land to the landlords but depriving them of control of persons, determined that they would attempt to gain control of future surplus by instituting competitive leases and encouraging primitive accumulation. heller maintext.indd 50 6/7/2011 11:50:55 AM the decline o f feudalism 51 In contrast to Brenner’s economistic and class-determinist method we have insisted that the importance of the economic and social must be understood in the light of a dialectical perspective. Economic and social factors have their part as elements of a contradictory totality in which culture and politics have a role. Of course we accept the notion that changes in the social relations of production were critical to the demise of feudalism. But when it comes to the origins of capitalism, I reject Brenner’s notion that it was English landlords who played the major role in the origins of capitalism in the face of the economic passivity of the peasant producers. Rather than landlords being decisive to the inception of capitalism, I have made the importance of the late medieval social differentiation of the producers a central theme of my conception. In the new economic circumstances of the sixteenth century, the petty producers would increasingly divide into rural capitalist producers and wage workers. The revolts of the rural and urban petty producers against feudalism reflected not merely their social combativeness but their economic and even religious aspirations as well. They were neither socially nor economically passive as pictured by Brenner. The class capacity of these producers must not be taken for granted but be seen as a product of the previous medieval development of the forces of production. The early emergence of capitalism, furthermore, cannot be understood as an exclusively English affair, but must be seen in terms of Western Europe as a whole. The struggle against feudalism and the development of capitalist relations appeared across Western Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. In order to fully grasp the specific conditions which allowed capitalism fully to crystallize in England, its development in Italy and elsewhere on the European Continent should be traced and brought into comparison with the English example. heller maintext.indd 51 6/7/2011 11:50:55 AM 2 exPerIments In caPItalIsm: Italy, germany, france The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that capitalism’s beginnings cannot be understood by looking at the isolated case of England. Capitalism – from the start a single system – actually began in Italy, spread to Germany and then to Holland and France. England was the last stop in this progress. Using the examples of Italy, Germany and France, which have been largely ignored in the transition debate, this chapter shows that many of the factors leading to the development of capitalism in England and Holland were also present in these countries. The key difference between these countries, where the development of capitalism was arrested or limited, and England and Holland lay in the balance of power between capital, the state and feudal power. Italy failed to consolidate a territorial state because of the too great strength of merchant capital, while in Germany and France feudalism proved too strong. Our study of these cases will demonstrate that, in addition to the economic conditions stressed by Brenner, two political conditions were critical to the successful development of capitalism: the existence of a territorial state, and the influence of capitalist or incipiently capitalist classes over the state. The faltering of capitalism in Italy, Germany and France sheds light on the importance of the more propitious political conditions which obtained in Holland as well as in England. And capitalism, being a single system which developed in an uneven fashion, meant that its eventual consolidation in Holland and England came at the expense of its further development elsewhere in Europe. The proper way of conceiving of capitalism’s origins is thus through a series of experiments which finally had their successful dénouement in these two states. Brenner’s insistence in his early work that capitalism developed more or less exclusively in England is certainly contrary to Marx’s views. He saw capitalism as a global or globalizing system of which Continental Europe was a part. The earliest process of capitalism, the expropriation of the peasantry, took place across Western Europe. Marx described it in Volume One of Capital: 52 heller maintext.indd 52 6/7/2011 11:50:56 AM experiments in capitalism 53 the proletariat created by the breaking up of the bands of the feudal retainers and by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil, this ‘free’ proletariat could not possibly be absorbed by the nascent manufactures as fast as it was thrown upon the world. … They were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances. Hence at the end of the 15th and during the whole of the 16th century, throughout West Europe, there was a bloody legislation against vagabondage.1 Such primitive accumulation was necessary to clear the ground for capitalism. England was only the classic instance of this process of expropriation, which Marx makes clear took different forms and followed different paths in different countries.2 Far from believing that capitalism originated in England, Marx explicitly recognized that capitalism developed first in the city-states of Renaissance Italy.3 Engels saw the revolution that shook Germany in 1524–25 as an early bourgeois revolution that arose from the development of capitalism there. Marx characterized the early processes of the emergent capitalism, what he called the different moments of primitive accumulation, as distributing themselves: now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England. In England at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system.4 England became the final station in a movement across the face of Western Europe, which as it developed came to involve more than the mere expropriation of the peasantry from the soil. In the light of this more global conception, Perry Anderson recently criticized Brenner’s Anglocentric view for what he describes as a ‘capitalism in one country’ approach. It makes only slightly more sense, according to him, than the notion of socialism in one country.5 While the latter makes nonsense of socialism as a transcendence of the limits of capitalism based on the territorial state, the former not only ignored the sequencing of primitive accumulation across Western Europe that Marx traced, but also forgot Lenin’s insistence that no state has ever become capitalist without connection to the world market. There is an unfortunate parochialism in Brenner’s viewpoint, and heller maintext.indd 53 6/7/2011 11:50:56 AM 54 the birth o f capitalism its negative consequences are many. It allowed Brenner to make exaggerated claims about the role of competitive markets in the early development of capitalism. It led him to fail to take proper account of politics – in particular the centrality of a unified territorial state and the influence of capitalist merchants and manufacturers over its policies. This chapter will begin to remedy this by viewing the origins of capitalism from a Europe-wide perspective. Accordingly, we will examine the development of capitalism in Italy and Germany in the first place. Failing to take permanent root in these places, these capitalisms must be understood as prologues to the development of capitalism in England. These failed or partially successful transitions on the Continent help to illuminate the reasons for England’s ultimate success. They also show that the development of capitalism is uneven – that success in one place comes at the expense of failure elsewhere. Finally it shows how historically contingent its full development was. This chapter also discusses the case of capitalism in France, whose development did not miscarry so much as retreated into hibernation under the seventeenth-century Bourbon monarchy. The great influence of Brenner’s Anglocentricism has meant that the origins of capitalism in that country in the early modern period have been denied, helping to foster the serious misconception that the French Revolution was not a capitalist revolution. The discussion of Holland is left to the next chapter, where its history better fits in the sequence of early modern bourgeois revolutions. renaIssance Italy Marx noted that capitalism first developed in Italy, and it dominated the European economy of the late Middle Ages. Yet Italy was scarcely mentioned in the original Dobb–Sweezy debate. The first attempt to take Italy into account was made at an inter-university conference held in Montreal in 1975.6 Giuliano Procacci, a participant in the original debate, insisted first that there was no one Marxist theory, only Marx’s hypotheses of the transition and differing interpretations of them. Second, he pointed out that the transition had been Europe-wide. An important implication of this was that it was naïve to assume an exact similarity and symmetry in comparing various national transitions. This is even more the case when it is understood that the development of an international market and the concomitant economic and geographic disequilibria were conditions of the transition itself.7 Here Procacci echoed Hobsbawm, who stressed world-wide uneven development as an essential characteristic of heller maintext.indd 54 6/7/2011 11:50:56 AM experiments in capitalism 55 capitalist development. From this we conclude that comparison may be essential and insightful, but has inherent limits. For the transition is not repeated in the same sequence (with or without interesting variations) by every country. It can be radically, qualitatively, different because capitalist development is a single global historical process. Third, Procacci introduced specifically Italian concerns into the discussion. Marxists in that country stressed that despite political division, the late medieval period saw the emergence of an internal market for labour and goods in the peninsula and, as a consequence, the appearance of agrarian capitalism in the fertile Po valley. Capital there entered and transformed agricultural production, and producers were transformed into wage labourers. Industrial development was likewise strongest there, especially in Lombardy. Elsewhere, by contrast, historians found the development of capitalist agriculture to have been weak. Procacci’s insistence on the importance of markets was followed by the comprehensive and profound analysis of the origins and failure of early Italian capitalism in the light of the Dobb–Sweezy debate by the distinguished Annales scholar and Marxist historian Maurice Aymard.8 Following closely in the footsteps of the master of the Annales School, Fernand Braudel, Aymard acquired a deep understanding of Italian Renaissance history based on primary research.9 Beginning his analysis of capitalist origins by surveying the vestiges of feudalism in late medieval Italy, Aymard observed that by the mid-fifteenth century the remains of serfdom had disappeared throughout the Italian peninsula. A stage had been reached in which people could sell their labour freely. Indeed, the expropriation of the peasantry through enclosures – taken as a hallmark of capitalism in sixteenth-century England – had already begun in Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In the wide plains of the Po valley – the most productive land in Italy – capitalist farming became prevalent. Throughout the rest of the peninsula, but especially in the centre, share-cropping was the most widespread form of tenure. Meanwhile in Naples and Sicily large arable estates continued to dominate. But over time the presence of the old ruling groups and the vestiges of feudalism there weakened. The landlords who owned or who were able to buy, sell and exploit these large estates came to be mainly urban merchants and notables. This change was manifest in a more intense and systematic exploitation of labour rather than enhanced capital investment. Hence the historic backwardness of southern Italian agriculture. heller maintext.indd 55 6/7/2011 11:50:56 AM 56 the birth o f capitalism Alongside the large estates of the south a system of compact homogenous farmsteads of up to several hundred hectares emerged elsewhere by the fifteenth century, in conjunction with a more urbanized and commercialized economy. Such allotments produced a great variety of crops based on extensive and intensive methods of cultivation. Modern or rational economic attitudes and accounting methods appeared, and in contrast to the large estates, these smaller holdings also displayed the tendency to invest large amounts of fixed as well as variable capital. The employment of wage labour paid in money was used more than elsewhere in Europe. The consolidation of five large states on the peninsula by the fifteenth century enlarged markets. Inter-regional and maritime trade between north and south also grew. Compared with the rest of Europe, markets and the commodification of agriculture were highly developed. Italian agriculture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries possessed all the elements of high farming that later emerged in England. Large amounts of urban or commercial capital flowed into agriculture not simply to buy but to improve land. Aside from landlord proprietors there was a class of farmer-owners who utilized capitalist methods of land management and in particular employed wage labour. It was during this Renaissance that northern and central Italy took on the aspect of the celebrated bel paesaggio, or beautiful landscape, with its characteristic sculpted and terraced hillsides and valleys.10 These developments not only raised the net agricultural product, and provisioned a particularly dense urban network in the north, but by doing so allowed a very early expansion of the manufacturing sector.11 In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the whole peninsula including the south was commercially linked in interregional and maritime networks dominated by the northern cities of Milan, Genoa, Venice and Florence. The integration of the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors allowed a high degree of urbanization and the emergence of new political structures, social relations and cultural values which are associated with the Italian Renaissance. The merchants of northern Italy (along with those of Flanders, on whom more below) dominated European wholesale commerce from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. They controlled the markets for raw materials and the outlets for manufactured goods. Long-distance trade in both precious and bulk goods lay in their hands. As needed, they developed new commercial and financial techniques while creating a financial network which covered Europe and the Mediterranean. Their dominance over international trade in wool cloth, silk, armaments, paper and glass set off the first heller maintext.indd 56 6/7/2011 11:50:56 AM experiments in capitalism 57 systematic processes of capital accumulation, and resulted in the reorganization of the countryside, especially in the Po valley.12 the domInance of merchant caPItal Aymard holds that it was the northern Italian cities which were responsible for the economic transformation of the countryside. Looking at their role specifically from the perspective of the Dobb– Sweezy debate, Aymard contends that Sweezy was right to see trade as a decisive factor in the transition, though he was wrong to see it as an exogenous force in causing the decline of feudalism and development of capitalism. According to Aymard the very merchant base of this capitalism – which was authentic enough – defined its limits. Unlike agriculture, no transformation of the means of production occurred in manufacturing, including in the all-important cloth industry dominated by merchants and guilds. Italian merchant capitalists proved to be uninterested in transforming the means of production in manufacture: we find once again the ‘structural’ character of merchant capital and its indifference to the mode of production of those commodities that enter into circulation which led to its continued preference for simple financial control over producers rather than real control of the processes of production.13 Rural capitalists were blocked from developing industry by the influence of urban merchants. Furthermore, the urban merchants who dominated this economy failed to develop a truly national market, which was critical to the further development of Italian capitalism. Only the creation of a wide and deep national market, especially one protected by a centralized territorial state, could have maintained the competitiveness of Italian manufacturing in the long term. the faIlure of ItalIan caPItalIsm According to Aymard there are three major interpretations of Italian capitalism’s failure to advance further. The first, epitomized in the work of Ruggiero Romano, insists that despite the appearance of modernity the Italian economy failed to achieve real breakthroughs in productivity. Not only did agriculture and industry remain technologically inert, this stagnation was compounded by an heller maintext.indd 57 6/7/2011 11:50:56 AM 64 the birth o f capitalism burghers, to which some of the nobility also subscribed, called for the material dispossession of the wealth and privileges of the ecclesiastical order. Agreeing with such notions, peasant and plebeian radicals took things a step further by calling for political, social and even economic equality.32 The propertyless, of whom there were increasingly large numbers, challenged the notion of a class-based society by espousing in utopian fashion the idea of all things in common.33 The Catholic conservative camp included the imperial authorities, the ecclesiastical and some lay princes, the richer nobles, the prelates and urban patricians. The Lutheran camp attracted to itself all the propertied members of the opposition, including the mass of the nobility, the burghers, and even some lay princes who wished to seize the property of the Church and increase their independence from the Holy Roman Empire. The peasants and plebeians constituted the radical party.34 The most important leader of the latter group was Thomas Münzer, who vainly advocated communism and a pantheism which, according to Engels, approached atheism.35 While the aspirations of the radical party were doomed to fail, so too were those of the more moderate reformers. No effective alliance between elements of the nobility and the bourgeoisie of the English sort emerged. In England serfdom had largely disappeared by the end of the Middle Ages and the old nobility was virtually wiped out in the Wars of the Roses, replaced by a new nobility of bourgeois origin. In contrast serfdom was still rampant in Germany, and the nobles drew their income largely from feudal sources. Political power lay overwhelmingly at the local and regional level.36 The nearest approximation to a bourgeois revolutionary program was articulated by Wendel Hipler in the so-called Heilbronn Manifesto, issued at the height of the Peasant War. Engels is careful not to claim that Hipler’s program was an expression of the bourgeoisie: it was rather an expression of ‘what may be described as the cross-section of the nation’s progressive elements, [which] anticipated modern bourgeois society.' While nominally written on behalf of the peasantry, the Heilbronn program called for a standardized currency, standard weights and measures, abolition of internal customs duties and so on: demands which were more in the interests of the townsmen than the peasantry. In order to reach out to the nobility, concessions were made that substantially approached the modern system of redemption and would have transformed feudal into bourgeois landlordship.37 Engels at one point compares the German Peasant War to the heller maintext.indd 64 6/7/2011 11:50:56 AM experiments in capitalism 65 French Revolution from a political point of view. In the case of the eighteenth-century revolution in a politically unified France, the whole country was split into two clearly opposed camps. In a deeply divided sixteenth-century Germany, this was a rank impossibility.38 On the other hand, Engels saw the Peasant War not simply as a German event but as an international one, based on the prospects for the further development of capitalism. As he reiterated on returning to the theme many decades later, ‘Reformation – Lutheran and Calvinist – is the No. 1 bourgeois revolution, the Peasant War being its critical episode. … Revolution No. 1, which was more European than the English and spread in Europe much more rapidly than the French.’39 Indeed, the Reformation spread throughout Western and Central Europe. hIstory In the deutsche demokratIsche rePublIk (ddr) Rejected by bourgeois historiography, Engels’s materialist interpretation of the Peasant War and the Reformation became the foundation of the viewpoint of the historians of the now defunct German Democratic Republic (DDR). But respect for this view was more than mere state and party orthodoxy. Though much historiographical water has flown under the bridge, Engels’s interpretation holds up remarkably well. It should be pointed out that East German Marxists historians were still inclined to take Luther’s and Münzer’s religiosity more seriously than did Engels. This stress on the historical importance of religious consciousness was in accord with the growing intellectual and economic rapprochement between the two states of divided Germany from the 1980s. Intellectuals in the DDR made efforts to conciliate Western German opinion while remaining faithful to their own materialist outlook. Their research also confirmed Engels’s view of the under-developed nature of the German bourgeoisie as a class. Finally, and perhaps most importantly from our perspective, the scholarship of both communist and Western historians revealed that contrary to Engels’s idea of a Germany economically lagging behind other countries, it was in the vanguard of an emerging European capitalism in the period 1470–1530. Between the 1950s and the 1970s East German historians produced a rich historiography on early modern German capitalism, the Reformation and the Peasant War. The results of this research were summarized in a magnificent collective history of the German early bourgeois revolution published in 1974.40 This work argued that the early bourgeois revolution in Germany must be understood heller maintext.indd 65 6/7/2011 11:50:56 AM 66 the birth o f capitalism in the international context of the full flowering of the humanist culture of the Renaissance, the consolidation of the territorial state in France and England, the overseas discoveries and the beginning of the primitive accumulation of capital. This Europe-wide epoch saw the decline of feudalism, and the origin and development of merchant and manufacturing capitalism. The outbreak of the early bourgeois revolution in Germany represented the zenith of this emerging capitalism.41 Population growth and overseas expansion led to an expansion of demand for commodities from the last third of the fifteenth century. The gold and silver mining sector expanded prodigiously – in the Tyrol and Styria, the Erzgebirge and in the border region between Western Hungary and Slovakia – facilitating exchange and accumulation in the first phase of capitalist expansion down to 1530. Capitalist relations of production were established throughout this key sector, with technical progress and substantial capital investment by capitalists from Nuremberg and other south German cities.42 Moreover, the influence of financial and merchant capital was also apparent to a greater or lesser degree in the grain and woad trade and the extensive metallurgical, wool, silk, linen, fustian, grain, salt, glass-making and printing industries that spread across the face of Germany. As the Reformation crisis approached, increasing sectors of the German economy came under the control of the powerful Függer family and other powerful merchant and banking firms.43 In Italy and England feudalism declined and capitalism took its place, but in Germany a powerful feudal reaction consolidated itself as the capitalist economy and financial and merchant capital advanced. Capitalism exacerbated class conflict at every level of German society, prompting noble violence, increased feudal dues and growing attempts to impose or reimpose serfdom on the peasantry, especially in southern and southwest Germany and the Rhineland in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The imposition of serfdom even served as a tool by which territorial princes exerted their authority.44 On the other hand, though they lacked leadership and common objectives the resistance of the common people became equally fierce, leading to the plebeian, worker and peasant protests that characterized the period leading to the Reformation crisis.45 The further development of capitalism was also hemmed in by the imperial and feudal order. The Hapsburg emperor sought to rule a universal European state, not a unified and centralized Germany. The emperor, as well as the territorial princes, blocked a national political project. At the same time, serfdom and feudalism heller maintext.indd 66 6/7/2011 11:50:56 AM experiments in capitalism 67 fundamentally barred the route to the development of capitalism in agriculture.46 Such a route might have been opened by the demands of the peasants during the Peasant War to abolish serfdom, sweep away both feudalism and the nobility, and consolidate government under the emperor. The peasants also demanded an end to the established Church with its landed wealth and feudal privileges, and the installation of a democratic church based on a revolutionary interpretation of the Gospel.47 The latter demand would have dissolved the ideological foundation of the feudal order. The end of feudalism and serfdom would have eased the burden on the peasantry, helped to improve output and furthered the primitive accumulation of capital.48 This account, like Engels’s, minimizes the role of the bourgeoisie in the Peasants’ War. Indeed, in so far as the financiers, merchants, burghers and skilled craftspeople participated in these events they generally sided with the Catholic or moderate Lutheran party, which opposed rural and urban radicalism. Faced with popular revolution, merchant capital was prepared to make its peace with feudalism. It was the peasants and plebeians rather than the stillnascent bourgeoisie who led the way in this unsuccessful attempt to further the development of capitalism in Germany.49 The failure of this democratic revolt, the eclipse of the German mining industry by the increasing flow of New World bullion into Europe, and competition from the Dutch and the English sealed the fate of this early upsurge of German capitalism. The trade of the numerically larger, but impotent, merchant class of Germany came to be subordinated to ‘the bourgeoisie of little Holland’.50 As in the case of Japan, lack of direct access to the world market helped to stifle German capitalism. revolutIon of the common PeoPle Developed in the DDR at the height of the Cold War, this view of the Peasant War became part of the ideological struggle between East and West. With some exceptions West German historians rejected this Marxist interpretation. However, historians in the West were unable to produce a more convincing account. Their critique of the East German view, it must be said, was too often marked by misconception, logic-chopping and misrepresentation,51 and the East German interpretation remains the most convincing. How convincing can be seen from the reception of Peter Blickle’s Die Revolution von 1525, published in West Germany in 1975. Its heller maintext.indd 67 6/7/2011 11:50:56 AM 68 the birth o f capitalism substantial endorsement of the East German position prompted a dramatic shift in the West German perspective on this crucial event in Germany’s history. Moreover on the one main point of difference between Blickle and the East German school, later criticism vindicated the latter. Originally published in the mid-1970s and republished in an expanded and revised fourth edition in 2004,52 Blickle’s work undoubtedly reflected the influence of the radicalism of the 1960s in West Germany. Not only was Blickle respectful of the Marxist position, he agreed that the Peasant War represented a profound crisis that threatened to overthrow the whole feudal order. The authoritative nature of Blickle’s account cast a pall over the earlier Cold War historiography of the Reformation, produced so zealously in the West. On the other hand, Blickle differed from the East German interpretation on the key argument that the revolt was an early bourgeois revolution. Rather, he portrayed it as an urban and rural communal movement of common people, based on a radical and egalitarian interpretation of the Gospel of the Reformation. In Marxist terms, Blickle’s view of the Peasant War is one of a conflict between feudal lords and urban and rural petty producers. tom scott’s structural adJustment This was challenged by the British academic Tom Scott, one of the most prolific and erudite contemporary scholars of the Peasant War. His text on German history between 1300 and 1600 is an extraordinary synthesis of recent scholarship on this exceedingly complicated period, and its axis is precisely the Peasant War. Scott provides an astonishingly clear and detailed analysis of the underlying forces leading up to and away from the uprising. Scott summarized his differences with Blickle on the Peasant War in a 2002 article.53 He counters Blickle’s view of a unified rural communal society challenging feudalism by portraying the advanced development of commercial agriculture, urban trade, mining and manufacturing, and finance capital in considerable detail. The growth of rural industry, including putting-out systems operated by merchant capital and the high degree of social differentiation in the villages between wellto-do peasants, cottagers, the landless and servants, throws doubt on the notion of a unified rural communal revolution.54 Extraordinary advances in research into the economic history of the period allow Scott to refute Blickle’s notion of the Peasants’ War as a communal revolution or of a revolt of petty commodity producers.55 heller maintext.indd 68 6/7/2011 11:50:56 AM experiments in capitalism 69 However, while Scott’s views broadly confirm and amplify those of the Marxist historians of the DDR on the extensive development of merchant and finance capitalism in Germany prior to the Reformation, he does not agree with them that the resultant crisis constitutes an early bourgeois revolution. He insists that the relations of production on the land determine capitalist development, and that the mere existence of markets or manufacturing does not, in itself, demonstrate it. Invoking Brenner, he notes that there is a difference between involvement in the market and dependence on it. The former, in fact, could help sustain feudal agriculture.56 The preconditions for a genuine transformation of the agricultural economy to capitalism – the commodification of landlordship and of labour – were, Scott argues, entirely absent in Germany in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.57 The commercialization of agriculture that did occur was fully compatible with feudalism. There was no crisis of feudalism, but rather only a structural transformation of it. According to Scott, it is difficult to speak of a crisis of feudalism when in fact landlords were improving their position rather than in decline.58 As for German history overall between 1300 and 1600, Scott sees continuity rather than rupture. The three centuries under consideration ‘witnessed the consolidation of a society of estates within a fragmented constitutional polity’.59 Scott’s structural-functionalist analysis of the meaning of the Peasant War in German history must be taken seriously, informed as it is by an extraordinary mastery of the subject. Moreover, his insistence on the decisive importance of rural capitalism to the development of capitalism is something with which Marxists including those of the former DDR would have concurred. Having said that, we cannot ignore the significance of the massive entry of capital into, and the development of, capitalist relations of production in the very large mining industry in this period for the development of German and indeed European capitalism. Nor can we neglect the extraordinary influence of merchant capital on virtually every aspect of the extensive German manufacturing sector. Indeed, Scott himself admits, even as he denies a crisis of feudalism, that the Peasant War was: a crisis in the sense that the assertion of seigneurial power produced a reaction on the part of those pushed down into a uniform category of subjection, of those, who, in the context of the 1520s, were able to invoke ‘biblicism’ against ‘feudalism’.60 heller maintext.indd 69 6/7/2011 11:50:56 AM 70 the birth o f capitalism But this admission is of greater moment than Scott realizes. The Marxist view, and indeed the view of Blickle, is that the Peasant War was not merely a structural rearrangement of the feudal order but a fundamental or revolutionary challenge to it. The overthrow of feudalism in these circumstances would have meant the initiation of the process of primitive accumulation on the land. While citing Brenner on markets, Scott ignores Brenner’s argument that the fourteenth-century crisis was critical to both the decline of feudalism and the inauguration of capitalism in England through class struggle. While Brenner’s notion of a simultaneous death of feudalism and birth of capitalism in the fourteenth century has been contested by Byres in particular, who continues a line of interpretation shared by Dobb, Hilton and even Sweezy, it was precisely in Germany at the beginning of the sixteenth century that there really was both a crisis of feudalism and an attempted breakthrough of capitalism. In England the Peasant Wars of the fourteenth century spelled the liberation of the peasant producers and corresponding decline of feudalism. In Germany, on the other hand, the late medieval class struggles of the peasant producers against feudalism only reached their climax in the sixteenth century. Capitalism was born in the midst of a dramatic class conflict between the rural producers struggling to liberate themselves and a strong feudal reaction. The attempt to overthrow feudalism and install capitalism occurred simultaneously. This is what made the crisis there so acute and the Peasant War so significant. Finally, Scott’s contextualization of the Peasant War must be criticized. He views it in the framework of German history. From this perspective, he insists on the continuity of German history, signalled by the failure of the popular uprising and triumph of feudal absolutism. Having weathered the crisis the feudal system reconsolidated itself in the modern period on the basis of the princely states of a divided Germany. Throughout the early modern period the rulers of these aristocratic states centralized and bureaucratized their principalities in imitation of the absolute governments of their more powerful Hapsburg and Bourbon neighbours. But for Engels and the historians of the German Democratic Republic, the context of that event was certainly Germany, but more importantly, the wider global history of capitalism. In that sense, the Peasant War was an experience of rupture and change – Revolution No. 1 in the chain of early bourgeois revolutions furthering the advance of the capitalist mode of production, as Engels’s revolutionary perspective led him to conclude. heller maintext.indd 70 6/7/2011 11:50:56 AM experiments in capitalism 71 france Having dealt with the failed development of capitalism in Italy and Germany, we turn finally to the case of France. It is important because of its role in the transition debate, especially as it unfolded under the influence of Brenner. Marx and Engels saw France as part of an emerging world-wide system of capitalist accumulation whose focal point was northwest Europe. As we saw, Marx includes it among the West European states undergoing diverse moments of primitive accumulation. Although he did not consider the matter in detail, Engels noted that capitalism in France developed within the contours of the emerging absolutist state. According to him, this early modern French monarchy reflected a balance between the emerging bourgeoisie and the feudal nobility.61 Anderson slightly modified this conception. He regarded the monarchy as above all reflecting the interests of the nobility, while recognizing that the absolute state fostered the influence of a commercial and manufacturing bourgeoisie moving toward capitalism.62 brenner’s other Brenner, however, flatly denied that capitalism developed in France. The origins of capitalist accumulation lay in England alone. The notion that both feudalism and a subordinated capitalism could dialectically coexist within the absolute state is excluded by Brenner’s monocausal logic. Indeed, in Brenner’s hands France reinforces the uniqueness of English capitalism by becoming the perfect foil for the latter, experiencing the same upsurge of class struggle as England in the late Middle Ages with a quite different outcome. In France, peasants came to control roughly 45 or 50 percent of the land as against only 25 or 30 percent in England.63 As a result of the greater share of property retained by the French peasantry, whatever tendency there was towards capitalism in sixteenth-century France was arrested. It is, then, the differing allocation of property and the contrasting relations of production that determined the divergent evolution of the two countries in the early modern period. In the eyes of Brenner, England is the model and norm of capitalist origins. France is the feudal other. Brenner has recently muted his initial thesis of English uniqueness by acknowledging that Holland, like England, also made the transition to capitalist agriculture. But France remains the preeminent example of failed transition.64 As the most important Marxist authority on the transition heller maintext.indd 71 6/7/2011 11:50:56 AM 72 the birth o f capitalism question today, Brenner’s view matters a great deal. His treatment of France has provided grist for the mill of the revisionist trend in historiography which has sought to sever the relationship between the French Revolution and the development of capitalism. Since Marx it has been the view of Marxists that, like the English Revolution, the French Revolution was a bourgeois and capitalist revolution. Such a view was a fundamental feature of the Marxist view of history. The Brenner thesis could suggest that given the non-capitalist evolution of France under the Ancien Régime, such a bourgeois and capitalist revolution was, to say the least, doubtful. In a curious way Brenner’s view based in Marxism dovetailed with a developing scholarly and political trend against the Marxist view of the French Revolution known as revisionism.65 This undeniably conservative historiographical current, ascendant since the 1980s, attacked the idea that the revolution in France could be understood as a bourgeois and capitalist revolution. Among Marxists who denied the capitalist basis of the revolution was George Comninel.66 According to him, the bourgeoisie in France prior to the Revolution did not base itself on profit but on rent. Moreover, wage workers were dependent, not on wages, but on their own sources of subsistence.67 This view coincided with Brenner’s notion of the ongoing hold of the French peasantry on the land, and certainly Comninel’s teacher Ellen Meiskins Wood was deeply influenced by Brenner on questions of capitalist origins. She agreed with Brenner’s insistence on the origins of capitalism lying exclusively in the social relations of production of the English countryside. Under French absolutism feudal rent dominated to the point that there was no capitalist bourgeoisie. The French Revolution was a bourgeois, but not a capitalist, revolution.68 What was an argument in Brenner’s work turned into a dogmatic certainty in the hands of Comninel and Wood. caPItalIsm In france As I have argued elsewhere, Brenner, Comninel and Wood are gravely mistaken on France.69 As in England, the sixteenth century saw an ongoing advance of the capitalist bourgeoisie. The religious civil wars (1562–94) were undoubtedly a period of economic regression and confused conflict of all against all – the bourgeoisie divided against itself, peasants against peasants, as well as against nobles and townspeople and, to top it all, nobles against nobles, and all sides in revolt against the state. On the other hand, there heller maintext.indd 72 6/7/2011 11:50:56 AM experiments in capitalism 73 can be no doubt that class conflict between bourgeoisie and nobles was the critical element. And it is reflected in what we know of the subjective experience of these conflicts. For example, one of the French King’s representatives in the Midi, the Baron Raymond de Fourquevaux, reported in 1573 that the source of the violence lay in the fact that the nobility were confronted by an increasingly aggressive bourgeoisie. The essential arena of conflict was a struggle over the land, in which the peasantry were being drawn in on the side of the bourgeoisie. The response of the nobles was to abandon the peasants to violence.70 As in the German Peasant War, the nobility responded to the threat from below by carrying on a class war from above. But the pugnacious French bourgeoisie were prepared to challenge the nobility in a way that the German bourgeoisie did not. Far from exhausting itself in the long war, the bourgeoisie, in league with the urban plebeians and an increasingly aroused peasantry, was prepared to confront noble power more and more as the conflict unfolded.71 The concept of noble status itself came under ideological attack.72 In the end, the Catholic and Protestant nobles who had revolted were forced back into obedience to the king in order to protect themselves from the growing menace of the Third Estate. This was the basis on which the Bourbon Henri IV (1594–1610) was able to begin to reconsolidate the monarchical state. The increasing political and social assertiveness of the bourgeoisie was based on its growing economic strength. The civil wars were hideously destructive, and resulted in a considerable economic and demographic regression. In the south of France, the capitalism that had developed in the first part of the sixteenth century faltered. On the other hand, things were very different in the richer grain lands of the north. The violence and heavy taxation of the civil wars may have forced many subsistence peasants off the land, but the bourgeoisie benefited from what amounted to primitive accumulation. A class of rural bourgeoisie in pursuit of profit was able to consolidate itself.73 The increased dependence of the expropriated peasantry on wages ensured the availability of abundant supplies of cheap labour for agricultural work. A wave of interest in agricultural improvement, new mechanical inventions and new manufactures developed during the religious wars, which continued through the reign of Henri IV.74 Indeed, the Bourbon monarchy sought to support and control these initiatives through its mercantilist policies. The seventeenth-century French state tried to contain this bourgeoisie while favouring the reconsolidation of the power of the heller maintext.indd 73 6/7/2011 11:50:56 AM 80 the birth o f capitalism Continental Europe at the time, and it remained a world-wide and ongoing phenomenon important to the subsequent development of capitalism, as we will discuss. the really revolutIonary Way The other factor in capitalist development singled out by Dobb and stressed by Marx was what they called ‘the really revolutionary way’. According to Marx and Dobb, production was historically reorganized under the capitalist mode of production in two possible ways.13 In one, merchant capital took control of the steps in the process of production from the outside, as it were, translating surplus labour into profits and reaching wider markets but doing little to revolutionize the means of production. This was typical of Italian merchant capitalism. Only the second way was ‘really revolutionary’, with small producers engaged in the actual production process undertaking to reorganize production in their branch of manufacture. It is considered really revolutionary because it was more likely to lead to the acceleration of economic innovation and technological change that we consider characteristic of capitalism. In contrast to this, as Dobb notes, merchant capital may restrict and smother attempts at economic innovation by those producers who come under its domination. Indeed, Dobb noted that capitalists emerging from the ranks of petty producers tended to oppose monopolies and ultimately absolutist governments, while the former group of merchant capitalists tended to be complicit with the established order.14 Complementing this development in manufacture was the emergence in the countryside of a class of increasingly well-off small producers who employed wage labour and were transforming themselves into capitalist farmers.15 While Sweezy expressed scepticism over Dobb’s reading of Marx, and dismissed the notion of a ‘revolutionary way’ altogether,16 other contributors to the transition debate accepted Dobb’s view with few reservations. As we have seen, Dobb noted that the role of such emergent capitalists entailed not only opposition to merchant capital but, sooner or later, opposition to feudalism and absolutist government.17 In a piece published in Science and Society in 1990, I suggested that this was key to understanding revolutionary politics in the early modern period.18 At the same time the alliance between feudalism and merchant capital is important in explaining the failed transition to capitalism in Italy and Germany, which was discussed in Chapter 2.19 heller maintext.indd 80 6/7/2011 11:50:56 AM english capitalism 81 WallersteIn’s World system A new stage in the debate was reached in 1974 with the publication of the first volume of Wallerstein’s The Modern World System.20 An American sociologist and Marxist specializing in Africa, Wallerstein was much influenced by third world dependency theory and the protest movements of the 1960s. Wallerstein had also been influenced by the thought of Braudel, the leader of the Annales in France. Braudel conceived of the history of global capitalism from the perspective of someone who regretted the decline of European and especially French power. Braudel, who considered himself a socialist, may perhaps be described as a sentimental imperialist. He rejected the upheavals of the 1960s, while his acolyte Wallerstein embraced them. Wallerstein’s interest in developing world systems theory arose from his awareness that contemporary capitalism based on American hegemony was in trouble, yet rooted in a system of unequal relations which was both tenacious and of long standing. At Binghampton University he created the Fernand Braudel Centre which published Review, a Marxist academic journal based on his notion of world systems. Wallerstein may be said to have revived and developed the position of Sweezy. He took from the latter the need to move from a single nation or parochial unit of analysis to a wider perspective on capitalism based on global commercial and political interchange.21 In common with Dobb and Brenner, he acknowledged that the class struggles of the fourteenth century marked the crisis of feudalism. But in contrast to their stress on changes in the relations of production as key to capitalist origins, Wallerstein emphasized overseas expansion which, in the first instance, was a way out of the impasse of class conflict from the perspective of the ruling class. It led towards the beginning of capitalism.22 The expansion of the world market is an exit from class conflict. Marx had noted that the sixteenth century saw the emergence of both proletarian labour and the world market. For him these two developments, tied together dialectically, marked the beginning of the capitalist epoch. But Wallerstein acknowledged the importance of the proletarianization of labour only in passing, emphasizing instead the emergence of the world market or a trade-based division of labour as the starting point for accumulation.23 On the basis of such a commercial development the early modern European political order might have evolved in the direction of a world empire, as had the ancient civilizations of China, Greece and Rome. In the first part of the sixteenth century the Spanish-Hapsburg Empire under heller maintext.indd 81 6/7/2011 11:50:56 AM 82 the birth o f capitalism Emperor Charles V (1516–58) made a serious bid to establish such a political dominion. If the Emperor Charles had succeeded, expanding markets and capital accumulation would have been permanently constrained by the fiscal and bureaucratic limitations of an overarching world state or political empire. But Charles’s failure to consolidate an imperial state allowed Europe to evolve in the direction of a world economy, or a capitalist world system characterized by a single division of labour or capitalist market, but multiple states and cultures.24 The failure of political empire favoured the proliferation of wage labour on the basis of a world market but also increased non-wage labour. Geographically, this ‘world economy’ of the sixteenth century expanded to western, southern and east-central Europe, and included the Mediterranean, Latin America and the coast of West Africa.25 Wallerstein may have decentred proletarian or wage labour, but only to place it in his more widely conceived capitalist world system. Its three main sectors were distinguished on the basis of the forms of labour each featured, the forms favoured by ruling classes in each sector based on the economic constraints and possibilities for profit within the emerging world market. At the core of the system in northwest Europe, wage labour became the dominant form of exploitation in agriculture and manufacture. In the semi-periphery which embraced the rest of western and central Europe, tenant farming, sharecropping and petty commodity craft production prevailed. In the peripheral zones of Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America which produced mainly grain and sugar, serfdom and slavery or coerced cash crop labour became the rule.26 The existence of free or wage labour specified or defined the emerging capitalist economy, Wallerstein acknowledged, as ‘the “relations of production” that define a system are the “relations of production” of the whole system, and the system at this point in time is the European world-economy’.27 But free wage labour could not be found throughout the world system, Wallerstein insisted. Free labour was the form of labour control used for skilled work in core countries. Coerced labour was used for less skilled work in peripheral areas. The combination of free and unfree labour was the essence of capitalism.28 This was a radical redefinition of capitalism, motivated by Wallerstein’s belief that accumulation at the centre was based not merely on the exploitation of wage workers in Europe, but also on the exploitation of producers on the capitalist periphery. In the core the market became the principal means of the control of labour. But such capitalist states also tended to be strong with heller maintext.indd 82 6/7/2011 11:50:57 AM english capitalism 83 regard to other strong states and with respect to weaker political entities in the semi-periphery and the periphery. In the periphery states were weak or even non-existent.29 In the semi-periphery and the periphery political or physical coercion of the labour force persisted, and was even intensified, as they were absorbed into the capitalist world system. The development of classes was a function of, or depended on, its international division of labour.30 In this system of uneven development and of strong states dominating and coercing weaker ones, economic surpluses tended to move from the periphery and semi-periphery toward the core.31 Over the long term under-development in the periphery developed in tandem with development in the core based on unequal exchange. The initial advantages of higher skill levels and more fixed capital reinforced by greater political power provide the core countries with a cumulative advantage over states located toward the periphery. ‘Hence,’ concludes Wallerstein, ‘the ongoing process of a world-economy tends to expand the economic and social gaps among its varying areas in the very process of its development.’ 32 brenner’s attack on ‘neo-smIthIan marxIsm’ In launching his attack on Wallerstein, Brenner insisted that what essentially differentiated capitalism from prior modes of production was its systematic tendency toward economic growth. The continual advances in labour productivity characteristic of capitalism had been facilitated by changes in the relations of production or property relations in the late Middle Ages that we have noted. Based on these changes, the onset of capitalism in the late fifteenth century increased productivity, reduced the price of goods and obtained a greater total output from the producers. This made it possible for the capitalist class to increase surplus without necessarily having to resort to increasing work time, intensifying work or reducing the standard of living of producers. The distinctiveness of capitalism lay in the extraction of relative surplus value through the development of the forces of production, which gave rise to a process of accumulation by means of cumulative innovation or, in other words, increasing productivity rather than depressing the workers’ wages or increasing their work time. This also laid the basis for an expanded reproduction of capital. Brenner insisted on this distinction because he wanted to argue that Wallerstein failed to take seriously enough the significance of the enhanced productivity of labour which is possible through the unique relations of production characteristic of the capitalist mode. heller maintext.indd 83 6/7/2011 11:50:57 AM 84 the birth o f capitalism According to Brenner, Wallerstein is unable to do so in part because of his commitment to dependency theory. Wallerstein insists on the essential role of the under-development of the periphery to the development of the core through the transfer of surplus. Thus, for Wallerstein the mere extension of production for profit based on market opportunities brings about accumulation. For Brenner, in contrast, production for profit based on exchange will only engender systematic accumulation when it expresses certain specific social relations, namely, a system of free wage labour where labour is a commodity: only where labour has been separated from the means of production, and where labourers have been emancipated from any direct relation of domination (such as slavery or serfdom), are both capital and labour power ‘free’ to make possible their combination at the highest possible level of technology.33 Only when both labour and capital are commodities freely exchangeable in the market will the resulting competition between productive units force them to produce at the socially necessary labour time necessary to survival, and entice them to surpass this level of productivity to reap the super-profit which, for a time, is the prize of the innovator. It is only under the pressure of such market constraints that capital accumulation develops. Brenner ties Wallerstein’s marketbased view to a line of thought running from Adam Smith to Sweezy and the dependency theorist André Gunder Frank. Wallerstein, Sweezy and Frank share Smith’s view that the specialization induced by a market-based division of labour will in itself produce gains in productivity. According to Brenner, Wallerstein and Sweezy appear to take a class perspective but in reality their analysis is tied to an atomistic or individualist approach to economic behaviour which is rooted in Smith. In contrast, Brenner insists that it is only under changed social relations of production where it is possible to employ free social labour that accumulation based on the extraction of increasing amounts of relative surplus value takes place. Under capitalist relations of production innovation, productivity increase and cost reduction become systemic economic imperatives; they are no longer choices. According to Brenner, attempts to increase surplus where the relations of production or class relations necessitate employing serf or slave labour take place where there is ongoing political control of labour, and therefore there is no systemic compulsion heller maintext.indd 84 6/7/2011 11:50:57 AM english capitalism 85 toward economic innovation. The innovation that does occur is based on the vagaries of chance. Brenner allows that Wallerstein does interest himself in class relations. But he argues that for him the transformation of class relations of production are merely the consequence or effect of commercialization. The early modern capitalist class in England – merchants, bankers, manufactures, gentry, capitalist farmers – was merely the heterogeneous expression of the expansion of markets at home and overseas. So was the incorporation of peripheral regions like Eastern Europe into the world capitalist market: it compelled the owners of feudal states to act increasingly as capitalist entrepreneurs. Wallerstein does not distinguish between the development of capitalism in the sense Brenner conceived it and the regressive transformation toward serfdom in the relations of production that took place under the impact of world market integration in Eastern Europe. For Wallerstein, serfdom, slavery and wage labour are all equally capitalist forms of labour control, differing only according to their place in the division of labour or the forms of economic specialization that develop in the world market. The distinctive role of wage labour in producing systemic imperatives towards accumulation through innovation and increases in labour productivity is ignored. Indeed, Wallerstein cannot see that the bias of the modern world toward technological innovation is based on the existence of distinctively capitalist relations of production founded on wage labour. According to Brenner, Wallerstein discounts social relations of production because he shares dependency theorists’ idea that capitalist development and under-development are two sides of the same coin. The development of capitalism in the core states led to, and came at the expense of, under-development in the periphery. Such a view is incompatible with Brenner’s view of capitalism’s historical distinctiveness: accumulation via innovation rooted in the historical development of a class system based on wage labour. In Wallerstein’s perspective, surplus is steadily transferred over centuries from the periphery toward the core. Higher levels of skill and greater accessibility to capital reinforced by the coercive power of the strong core states ensure such a historic transfer of wealth. As Brenner puts it, in dependency theory under-development is the result of a primitive accumulation of capital extracted from the periphery by the centre and the resultant lack of capital in the periphery. For Brenner the primitive accumulation of capital in the periphery has nothing to do with the origin of capitalism. Quoting Marx, heller maintext.indd 85 6/7/2011 11:50:57 AM 86 the birth o f capitalism Brenner insists that ‘the so-called primitive accumulation is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.’34 In other words, primitive accumulation was the process of forcing subsistence producers from the land, forcing them to sell their labour power for a wage, and in so doing, turning the land into capitalist means of production. This occurred not in the periphery but in England. Brenner does not ‘deny there was a long-term transfer of surplus away from the periphery’.35 But he locates its cause elsewhere. Surplus was extracted by pumping out absolute surplus value through reducing wages and keeping workers’ subsistence at minimal levels. This limited the internal market for capital or consumer goods in peripheral countries. The upper classes were only interested in importing luxuries in return for the locally produced surplus. And the development of free wage labour was inhibited by the predominance of forced labour coexisting with peasant subsistence producers. But the flow of surplus out of peripheral countries was not determined by the unequal economic and political relationship with the centre as Wallerstein or the dependency theorists argued. Rather, it was the class-structured lack of investment opportunities that determined this outflow. Other than the restricted market for luxuries, there was no market to make investment profitable. Driving the point home, Brenner uses the example of early modern Poland. He shows that not only could it not initiate capital accumulation because of its class structure based on serfdom, it could not even adequately respond to market opportunities for its grain stemming from Western Europe. As a counter-example, Brenner points to the English eighteenth-century colony of Pennsylvania. In contrast to most colonies and regions in the periphery where forced labour predominated, the population of Pennsylvania was mainly composed of free small-scale farmers, allowing the slow development of a process of capital accumulation. Brenner recognized that his challenge to Wallerstein represented another round in the transition debate which had earlier seen the defeat of Sweezy’s notion of capitalist origins based on the development of long-distance trade as the prime mover. Certainly Brenner’s critique was a conceptual tour de force. Steeped as it was in a deep understanding of both Marxism and the historical process, Brenner’s arguments decisively reassert the primacy of the development of capitalist relations of production to the origins of capitalism. In particular it points to the development of capitalism in agriculture as critical to the inception and consolidation of the new mode of production in England and elsewhere. heller maintext.indd 86 6/7/2011 11:50:57 AM english capitalism 87 the Problems WIth brenner At the same time, Brenner’s position was not without its problems, all of them concerned with the privileged position England enjoyed in his account of the origins of capitalism. Brenner was absolutely correct to insist that the extraction of relative surplus value or increases in labour productivity is only made possible by the proletarianization of labour. Yet Brenner tended to exaggerate the actual increase in agricultural productivity that occurred in the early phases of capitalism. Robert C. Allen has shown that over the period 1500 to 1800 overall output of grain in England rose by 150 per cent.36 Over the same period output per worker increased by 43 per cent. But most of this gain came in the eighteenth century in the period of the so-called agricultural revolution. In the sixteenth century, which is the period when the extraction of relative surplus value and productivity increases are supposed to have begun working their magic according to Brenner, output per worker actually declined, if we follow Allen. Productivity experienced a modest if steady rise in the seventeenth century. This seventeenth-century growth was enough to overcome the Malthusian crises to which other states in Europe were still subject. It is real growth, but of a moderate, rather than spectacular, kind. It is only towards the end of the whole period that competitive markets began perhaps to drive increases in productivity. Indeed, it ought to be kept in mind that it is not a certainty that competitive markets actually were responsible for the increases in productivity of the eighteenth-century agricultural revolution. The most that we can say is that they were then in place in a way that was not the case earlier. Brenner’s tendency is to associate the generation of relative surplus value based on free labour with the core, and the production of absolute surplus value with the unfree labour of the periphery. England, whose economy was increasingly based on the extraction of relative surplus value, advanced rapidly. The rest of Europe, where economies lacked this feature, lagged behind, retarded rather than bolstered by its connection with the periphery: But surely to the extent that the early modern ‘European world economy’ … was defined by the interconnected systems of production based on coerced cash crop labour in the periphery and based on free labour in the core – it remained fundamentally ‘pre-capitalist:’ a sort of renewed feudalism, with a somewhat wider scope. The lack of a real breakthrough was indeed reflected heller maintext.indd 87 6/7/2011 11:50:57 AM 88 the birth o f capitalism in the inability of the ‘modern world economy’ to provide the material underpinnings for continuing economic-industrial growth in most of Europe through the early modern period decisively better than had the serf-based economy of Europe during the mediaeval period.37 This analysis invites some scepticism. While he is right to insist that the capitalism is characterized by a systematic imperative towards producing relative surplus value, Brenner forgets that Marx saw these two forms of surplus extraction as working in tandem in the development of capitalism in England as well as the rest of Western Europe. According to Marx, increases in the working day, reductions in wages, increases in the intensity of work were all methods of increasing surplus value, alongside introducing new methods and technologies and reorganizing work or increasing labour productivity. The historical evidence suggests that the extraction of absolute surplus value remained important to the accumulation of capital in England and northwest Europe from the sixteenth until the middle of the nineteenth century.38 Indeed, the revisionist view of the Industrial Revolution which has become predominant among economic historians since the 1980s strengthens an emphasis on the importance of the extraction of absolute surplus value to the history of accumulation. Such revisionism does not deny the importance of the new technological and organizational achievements of the Industrial Revolution, whose contributions to the economic growth of the period were taken for granted by most earlier historians. But this revisionism does diminish their weight in the overall English economy until the later nineteenth century. As such it dramatically reduces the earlier overly optimistic estimates of economic growth in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While there was some economic growth, labour productivity throughout the economy scarcely rose during the Industrial Revolution. Per capita income prior to the onset of the Industrial Revolution was a lot closer to the level of the period of Industrial Revolution than previously believed.39 More generally Brenner over-emphasizes the extraction of relative surplus value at the expense of the overall accumulation process, whereas it is necessary to keep in sight the dialectical historical and economic relationship between capital accumulation and the development of relative surplus value. As capitalism advances the growth of the productivity of social labour leads to the devaluation of all existing capital, as the value of commodities is determined not by the labour time taken by their production originally but by the labour heller maintext.indd 88 6/7/2011 11:50:57 AM english capitalism 89 time taken for their production currently. This labour time steadily diminishes as the productivity of social labour grows. Therefore existing capital, instead of appearing as the result of a long process of previous accumulation involving primitive accumulation and the absolute as well as relative exploitation of labour, appears in an illusory fashion the result of a relatively short reproduction period. The previous long and painful accumulation of capital necessary to the further increase in the productivity of social labour is lost sight of by Brenner.40 The most we can say about the period 1500–1800 from this perspective is that technological innovation and the reorganization of production facilitated a gradual if uneven rise in the extraction of relative surplus value in agriculture and manufacturing in England, and to a lesser extent on the Continent. Progress in this respect gradually increased from the seventeenth century onward. Sparked by previous advances in Flanders, innovations like enclosure, mechanization, three-field crop rotation, water meadows and selective breeding made headway in England and northern France in the eighteenth century. The same century saw the emergence especially in England of increasingly capitalized and concentrated industries based on technological breakthroughs like the spinning jenny, flying shuttle, power loom, puddling of iron and the steam engine. But it should be stressed that most of these innovations came late in this 300-year period. Over the whole early period the development of dispersed rural industries and large numbers of large-scale handicraft workshops or so-called manufactures – the characteristic forms of industrial growth – saw longer hours and greater intensity of work at subsistence or near-subsistence wages as much or more than it did increases in relative surplus extraction through technological innovation. At the very least both methods of surplus extraction went hand in hand with the extraction of relative surplus value, gradually amplifying the extraction of surplus through continued or intensified absolute exploitation. the non-euroPean contrIbutIon to euroPean caPItalIsm Brenner’s acknowledgement that the extraction of absolute surplus value from the periphery did happen was acompanied by his discounting the importance of such non-European surpluses to capitalist accumulation in Europe. This is no mere academic matter. It stems from his fundamental political and theoretical disagreement with heller maintext.indd 89 6/7/2011 11:50:57 AM 96 the birth o f capitalism sixteenth century is not easy, since in early years much farmland was not rented for its (hypothetical) current rental value. Instead land was held on a bewildering variety of tenures or customary leases, which were well below supposed or estimated market values. At the beginning of the sixteenth century one can hardly speak of a real market in land.55 Keith Wrightson confirms Clark’s view, describing how over the next century a rational land market only gradually emerged out of a process that involved enclosure and class struggles including struggles over rents.56 Brenner speaks about capitalist farmers taking up economic leases. Yet having stressed class struggle in the fourteenth century, Brenner seems content to ignore it in the sixteenth century. In contrast Mark Overton points out that the establishment of rental terms between landlords and capitalist farmers was fraught with conflict, which frequently led to lawsuits and violence.57 We have already spoken of the role of force in constituting both national and international markets. It is important to understand the creation of the markets in land at the local and regional levels in a like way. The creation of a labour market, like the creation of a land market, was a prolonged and highly coercive process which was more political and ideological than based on the market. The process of primitive accumulation already reflects this. Dispossessing producers moreover did not automatically lead them to take wage work. The imposition of humiliating and punitive poor laws was required to deal with recalcitrants and vagabonds. Indeed, one aspect of the new Puritan Calvinist religion that especially appealed to the emerging class of rural and urban capitalists was that as a form of ideological coercion it helped employers to enforce and implant a ferocious and paternalistic work discipline on their workers. In sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, furthermore, labour was not viewed as an unfettered commodity whose disposition could be left to the play of the market. Rather those who worked for wages were seen as a common resource to which the powerful in the community had rights. Labourers and artificers had legal obligations to make that resource available, not on the basis of terms set by the wage worker or the market, but on terms imposed by the local community. While for the most part they were not members of an employer’s household and under his control, wage workers were governed paternalistically in an analogous way.58 Wage labour remained under strict local government control. Employers used these paternalistic regulations to continue to block labour mobility and to suppress workers’ demands for improved working conditions heller maintext.indd 96 6/7/2011 11:50:57 AM english capitalism 97 into the modern period. It is only in the nineteenth century that there emerged a labour market and labour as a free commodity, as it were. Moreover it only did so after prolonged struggle by the emerging trade union movement.59 Pace Brenner, these developments were pointed out in Marx’s Grundrisse.60 I should underscore that I agree with Brenner that in the history of capital the appearance and spread of wage labour and a market for it must be regarded as decisive. They are the basis on which value emerges, as we see below. Yet it is important to appreciate that the development of wage labour itself has a history. It emerged as the gradually predominant element in a complex set of hierarchical forms of economic exploitation and domination in the early modern period which included apprenticeship, craft workshops, domestic service, indentured labour, female employment both in and outside the family, child labour and slavery. The successful abolition of capitalism, I might add, will involve the settling of accounts with this complicated historical legacy of exploitation, in which labour is not really free.61 The abolition of capitalism is not simply a matter of doing away with the capitalist economy and state through social and political revolution. It entails a prolonged struggle to democratize the centuries-old social and economic hierarchies of the existing division of labour. In any event it does not help to speak, as Brenner does, of the free play of labour in the market from the sixteenth century. the caPItalIst farmer The class of capitalist tenant farmers who took up the so-called economic leases offered by landlords is central in Brenner’s arguments. But whereas for Dobb, Hilton and Byres the appearance of this class was critical to the eventual flowering of rural capitalism, Brenner minimizes their role. As in his account of the decline of feudalism, it is the landlords who retain the initiative. In the struggles of the late Middle Ages the latter succeeded in holding onto the major part of the arable land. Then in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the nobility, including the high aristocracy, are pictured by Brenner as innovative capitalist landlords. Responsive to the competitive pressures of the marketplace, they assume leadership in leasing their lands on competitive terms to tenants who are also compelled to innovate in order to meet their rents. As both landlords and capitalist farmers were forced to encourage innovation, a process of capital accumulation developed in the countryside. As described by Brenner, it is the landlords who force the pace in this movement heller maintext.indd 97 6/7/2011 11:50:57 AM 98 the birth o f capitalism toward capitalist agriculture. They overshadow their tenants, who are forced to accept and accommodate themselves to changes in their leases imposed upon them by their landlords. Such a top-down view of capitalist origins, if true, would tend to clinch Brenner’s argument that the landlord-dominated social property relations that emerged out of the class struggles of the late Middle Ages inexorably determined the capitalist development that followed. Brenner’s evidence on the ongoing control of the bulk of the land by landlords, and the emergence of capitalist farms organized on the tripartite classic division between landlord, tenant farmer and wage labourers, is incontestable. On the other hand, he offers little evidence that landlords took the lead in the consolidation of capitalist farms. On the basis of intensive archival research, Jane Wittle questions Brenner’s notion that short-term leases by landlords helped to spark the engrossing, or the reorganizing of the land in England into larger units.62 Rather, she argues that enterprising peasant producers took the initiative in creating such farms. While Whittle’s argument is based on evidence from Norfolk, and would have to be extended to be conclusive, she does show that, in this area at least, landlord interference in the market for customary land was minimal in the period up to 1580. The value of rents to landlords fell in the fifteenth century, and they were diminished further in the sixteenth century by inflation. Tenants, not landlords, benefited from rising land values, and it was tenants, not landlords, who brought about engrossment. Far from the market being imposed upon peasants from above as Brenner would have it, the emerging land market was integral to strategies of peasant acquisition and landholding.63 It was the advancing class of capitalist farmers rather than the landlords who, seeing opportunity in the market, took the economic initiative. Brenner’s view of a landlord-led agrarian capitalism in England is also contested on other grounds. Mark Overton, who has an impressive mastery of the concrete details of contemporary research, argues that tenants were not at the mercy of landlords with respect to the terms of their leases.64 Leases often protected tenants, and these protections were frequently upheld in the courts. Economic differentiation was a process which occurred between tenants. Landlords did not frequently take the initiative in innovation; it was tenants and freeholders who did. Large farms were not a prerequisite for higher land productivity. Crop yields were independent of farm size from the seventeenth century onwards.65 Finally, on Brenner’s view which minimizes the significance of the independent peasant producer in England, we would expect that agrarian capitalism heller maintext.indd 98 6/7/2011 11:50:57 AM english capitalism 99 developed in areas where landlord control was strong and peasant property rights were weak. In fact the reverse is the case, according to Overton. The most striking advances in output and land productivity occurred in areas where lordship was relatively weak. All this argues for the decisive importance of the small producer in control of the means of the production, rather than the landlord. Overton’s critique appears to be derived from the views advanced earlier by the distinguished historian of English agriculture H. J. Habakkuk.66 Habakkuk denied that landlords were an active economic class involving themselves in the improvement of agricultural methods. He even questioned the idea that, as late as the end of the eighteenth century, they were prepared to impose economic leases on their tenants. Rather than creating the new agriculture, Habakkuk concluded that they were the passive beneficiaries of it. Habakkuk’s view of economic leases is echoed by that of P. K. O’Brien and D. Heath on the actual evolution of so-called economic rents as late as the eighteenth century: In any case, the turnover of established in favour of more efficient farms probably changed rather slowly, if only because such ‘commercial’ behaviour alienated other families on the estate and reduced their confidence to invest in land and improvements that gestated slowly through the seasons. Co-operation between landlords and tenants continued to depend far more upon tradition than upon contractual obligations. The eviction of families that had resided upon an estate for generations may have become more common in the eighteenth century but was still regarded as bad form. Tenancies-at-will worked best wherever owners and their stewards operated in a rather close working partnership with tenants and provided them with wellmaintained farms, sound advice, and above all adequate rewards or compensation for investments in the long-term productivity of farm land.67 According to these authors, the time of economic rents arrived not in the sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth centuries but only in the wake of the French and Industrial Revolutions. salvagIng brenner? Brenner’s stress on the importance of agrarian class struggle to the decline of feudalism and setting the stage for the emergence of heller maintext.indd 99 6/7/2011 11:50:57 AM 10 0 the birth o f capitalism capitalism is fundamentally important. So too is his emphasis on the accumulation of capital through the extraction of relative surplus value made possible by capitalist relations of production, in contrast to the ‘Smithian’ approach of Frank and Wallerstein. On the other hand, his dismissal of the importance of absolute surplus value and primitive accumulation, especially in the periphery, is unfortunate. His assumption of the sixteenth-century market as rational and competitive appears anachronistic. His privileging of the landlords over the rural bourgeoisie as the prime agent of capitalist development is doubtful. It is also problematic with regard to the English Revolution, as we shall see. Brenner’s problems are only magnified by his epigones. When Ellen Wood recently restated Brenner’s views on the origins of capitalism,68 she emphasized the importance of the development of wage labour to the onset of accumulation even more than him, and connected the growing dependence of wage earners on the market for items of household consumption to the development of the home market for manufactures.69 She may even have understated the extent of wage dependence, and of the self-exploitation of farmers and craftspeople employing no wage labour under the compulsion of the market on which they had become dependent.70 The statistics assembled by Gregory King, writing toward the end of the seventeenth century, testify to as much as 40 per cent of the population in England being dependent on wages for a livelihood.71 Jan De Vries found that wage labour was already in the seventeenth century the single most important source of income throughout much of northwest Europe.72 That being said, in the social relationships in sixteenth and seventeenth-century rural England the growing influence of wage labour did not amount to a free market in labour, as we have already seen, nor did it imply the extent of market dependence assumed by Wood. The persistence of apprenticeships, master–servant relationships, indenture and the constraints of the Poor Law inhibited the full development of an unconstrained labour market. In explaining the emergence of capitalism, Brenner laid emphasis on the role of capitalist landlords imposing economic rents on more affluent tenant farmers. According to him, this forced the latter to innovate in order to meet the terms of their leases. It was the new system, based on market compulsion, which was forced on landlords and tenants that sparked accumulation. Wood helps us to understand Brenner’s logic further. She notes that certain of Brenner’s critics have questioned his emphasis on landlords rather heller maintext.indd 100 6/7/2011 11:50:57 AM english capitalism 101 than better-off peasants in the genesis of capitalism. Wood responds that it was less a question of which class took the lead than of understanding the process of market compulsion imposed on both. Indeed, she argues that those who take the view of the above critics do not fully understand the difference between market involvement and market compulsion. The latter was key. In so far as they think that mere involvement in the market automatically leads rich peasants to become capitalist farmers, Dobb, Hilton and Byres fall back into a Smithian or commercial model of capitalism.73 But Wood only changes the subject. As we shall see, whether we place the emphasis on capitalist farmers or nobles has everything to do with our understanding of the social and political history of capitalism. Since this is so, we would do well to examine Wood’s arguments further. Do we really have to choose between market coercion and market opportunity? Hilton’s and Whittle’s researches suggest that market opportunities drew rich peasants more and more into the market. Such involvement would eventually have made them subject to the competitive pressures or the coercive effects of the market. Moreover, Wood’s position has a dogmatic quality which is not only belied by the concrete historical circumstances, but also contradicted by the very authorities she invokes. In The Origins of Capitalism she harks back to the work of Karl Polanyi, praising him for understanding that markets were historically evolved institutions.74 But Polanyi insisted that markets in England were embedded in society until the end of the eighteenth century, and indeed even afterward, and as such were deeply regulated. How Polanyi’s conception can be reconciled with Wood’s notion that markets in England operated on the basis of competition, freedom and rationality from the beginning of the sixteenth century is unclear. I conclude that Wood’s, and indeed Brenner’s, conception of the operation of the market is anachronistic. While both chastised Wallerstein for his Smithian notion of capitalism based on individual choices and the division of labour in the market, and both insisted that primacy be given to relations of production or social property relations, they too place enormous stress on the market, albeit a market conceived as perfect or perfectly competitive in the economist’s sense. In a manner of speaking they have thrown the market out the front door but only to smuggle an even more dogmatic conception of it through the back. There is a lesson in this. Forms of commercial or financial capitalism based on markets to the exclusion of production can be regressive. Hilton, Takashi and Dobb saw them as reinforcing feudalism. They helped to smother heller maintext.indd 101 6/7/2011 11:50:57 AM 10 2 the birth o f capitalism the shoots of capitalism in Italy and Germany. Their intrusion into industry tended to stifle innovation in manufacturing, as Marx and Dobb stressed. Brenner and Wood rightly emphasize that the market can never initiate accumulation. On the other hand, as Brenner and Wood suggest, where capitalist relations of production become fully entrenched, the market including its commercial and financial aspects can, once matured, foster economic competition and capital accumulation. I would go further, insisting that the realization process made possible by markets is indispensable to the further expansion of capitalism, understood as a totality based on an expanding spiral of value. the bIrth of value It should be noted that Wood is deservedly celebrated as a political theorist. She is at her best in describing the connection between the emergence of agrarian capitalism and the tentative emergence of a labour theory of value in the work of John Locke, in particular in his ideas about property rights. For such rights were, in his view, labourbased. Only the investment of labour to improve land, to increase its productivity, could justify the dispossession of indigenous populations, first in Ireland and later in the American colonies.75 Such ideas, Wood argues, distinguished England’s distinctively capitalist colonialism from Spain’s or other European countries’. And they arose from an agrarian capitalism driven, by the late seventeenth century, by the dynamic of relative surplus value.76 As Wood notes, Locke was not alone in adumbrating the notion of labour as the source of value. In fact, there were frequent assertions among Locke’s contemporaries of the view that labour was the source of value.77 While they did not articulate a full-fledged labour theory of value (that would only come with Marx), it is significant that the late seventeenth century saw a cluster of thinkers prepared to assert that labour was the source of value. It reflects the growing role of labour power in England’s emerging capitalist economy. In other words, the recognition by late seventeenth-century students of economy that labour is the measure of value signals for the first time the definitive supersession of earlier pre-capitalist forms of economic exploitation by capitalist relations of production and exchange.78 How profound a social transformation this represented was suggested by Marx where he noted that Aristotle had already discovered that there must be a relation of equality between the values of commodities. But to identify such a relation one must acknowledge heller maintext.indd 102 6/7/2011 11:50:57 AM english capitalism 103 that all labour is equal. Living in a profoundly unequal society, Aristotle could not articulate the notion of the equality of labour. Founded on slavery, Greek society had as its basis the notion of the inequality of human beings and their labour. The idea of value, or that all labour in general is equal, cannot be comprehended until the notion of human equality has established itself in consciousness as a popular prejudice.79 Such an idea did emerge in the course of the levelling social and political transformations in England in the seventeenth century. conclusIon In this chapter our discussion has underscored the ongoing force of Dobb’s account of capitalist origins, in particular his views on the importance of primitive accumulation and of the really revolutionary way led by petty producers. These views were challenged by Wallerstein, who revived, modified, and expanded Sweezy’s original stress on the importance of exchange. His view of capitalism as a world-wide system of economic and political relations has ongoing if incomplete explanatory power, but Brenner’s critique and reiteration of the decisive significance of the wealth-creating potential of the new capitalist relations of production in the capitalist core remains critical to any understanding of the capitalist accumulation process. On the other hand, I believe that Brenner’s conception of the history of capitalism is parochial and economistic. Brenner has gotten ahead of himself in insisting on the overwhelming influence of the extraction of relative surplus value as a factor driving accumulation prior to the Industrial Revolution. His ideas about the effect of competitive markets in which landlords are leading actors appear historically anachronistic. Uncomfortable with dialectics, Brenner fails to see capitalism as an expanding totality in which production and realization are each indispensable, and in which each has a history. He pays little or no attention to the role of the state as an intrinsic feature of capitalism. The state played a critical role from the very beginnings of capitalism, and capitalism cannot really consolidate itself as a mode of production without control of the state. It is the state that helps capitalism to generalize and organize itself. Beyond a certain point capitalism cannot develop further without control of the state. Accordingly, it is the question of the consolidation of the capitalist state through revolution that we must now address. heller maintext.indd 103 6/7/2011 11:50:57 AM 4 bourgeoIs revolutIon This chapter reasserts the classic Marxist view of the English and French Revolutions as bourgeois and capitalist. These revolutions proved critical to the consolidation of the new mode of production. The revolution in Holland was likewise bourgeois and capitalist. Economistic readings of the origin of capitalism tend to discount the importance of all three revolutions, and Brenner, though he recently conceded that early modern Holland was capitalist, ignored its revolution. Contrariwise I argue that from the beginning the state was intrinsic to capitalism as a result of its generalizing and integrating functions. Its revolutionary transformation at a certain point was essential to capitalism’s development. With regard to England Brenner and Wood argue, improbably, that the necessary and sufficient conditions for the development of capitalism were established by changes in the social relations of production during the late medieval period. The English revolution was neither capitalist nor bourgeois. At best it confirmed an already functioning capitalism politically. In the case of France Comninel, supported by Wood, asserts that its revolution was somehow bourgeois but not capitalist. I shall demonstrate that such views are in conflict with existing scholarship. The views of Brenner and his followers represent an unwarranted revision of the Marxist view of history in which the revolutionary mobilization of the people and notably its most organized elements are central elements to the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In my view the roots of this pessimism are to be found in the failure of the revolutionary politics of the 1960s. Revolution plays a central role in Marx’s and Engels’s theory of history. Capitalism developed within the pores of feudalism. As it matured feudalism was transformed into the absolutizing royal state in both England and France. In an initial phase the emerging bourgeoisie and the royal state acted in partnership, especially to curb the private and anarchic violence of the nobility. But beyond a certain point, the state began to interfere with the further development of capitalism, and restricted the growing power and ambition of the bourgeoisie while protecting the interests of the nobles. The Dutch, English and French revolutions represented the moment 10 4 heller maintext.indd 104 6/7/2011 11:50:57 AM bourgeois revolution 105 when the bourgeoisie took things into their hands politically and put an end to both feudalism and absolutizing or absolute government. In the transition from feudalism to capitalism we see revolution as the moment in which the fetters inhibiting the full development of capitalism were finally cast aside. As a consequence of these revolutions, existing class relations and the superstructure of society were transformed so as to clear the way for the blossoming of a fully mature capitalism.1 The English and French revolutions, as well as the revolution in Holland, are the classic Marxist examples of bourgeois and capitalist revolutions. In recent years there has arisen a substantial literature questioning this view. Much of this work is anti-Marxist, committed to undermining the Marxist view of history. However an important strand of this revisionist history is associated with Brenner’s ideas. To what degree Brenner endorses them is unclear. In any case, this revisionist viewpoint has crystallized into a school of thought known as Political Marxism. This chapter will test the claims of this school. By capitalist revolution we understand the sweeping away of feudal obstacles to the further development of the capitalist forces of production by a violent and more or less rapid transformation of the state and social relations. Masses of workers, craftspeople and peasants were necessarily involved in such great transformations. In these three revolutions the petty producers and especially the emerging capitalist element among them played a key role. But these revolutions are considered bourgeois as well as capitalist because the bourgeoisie – profit-seeking merchants, manufacturers and rich peasants, but also lawyers, state functionaries, scholars, physicians and even a minority of enlightened nobles – assumed political and social leadership over the revolutions and became their principal directors and beneficiaries. In the wake of such upheavals the state acted purposely to spread and integrate capitalist relations of production throughout society. Contrary to the views of the Political Marxists, bourgeois revolutions were also capitalist revolutions. holland At this point it is important to remind ourselves that Engels judged the Peasant War in Germany in the light of the notion of bourgeois revolution. He saw it as a revolution ahead of its time, or as an early bourgeois revolution. Capitalism, if not a mature bourgeoisie or a national state, had come into being. But the absence of the latter heller maintext.indd 105 6/7/2011 11:50:57 AM 112 the birth o f capitalism Marx’s observations suggest the emergence in seventeenth-century Holland of an expanding pool of wage earners whose labour was generating profits that derived from more than exchange relations. Indeed, recent research reveals the existence in seventeenth-century Holland of an extremely large, if segmented, proletariat.18 Elsewhere in Capital Marx notes that in Holland commercial credit and dealing in money developed along with trade and manufacture. Indeed, financial capital became subordinate to industrial and commercial capital. According to Marx, ‘in the seventeenth century … Holland served as the model country of economic development, just as England does today.’19 Such a view is hardly compatible with the view of Holland as a ‘feudal business economy’. Holland, in fact, had a substantial manufacturing base with the most advanced technological infrastructure in Europe. The annual number of patents issued in Holland between 1590 and 1680, for example, slightly exceeded the number issued in England between 1660 and 1740.20 It is in this context that Brenner launched a major new intervention in the 1990s. Invited to a conference of experts on the economy of the early modern Netherlands to discuss his views, Brenner tossed off a paper which not only defended his notion of capitalist origins, but asserted, contrary to his earlier Anglocentric perspective, that early modern Holland was a fully capitalist economy.21 Unlike in most of the rest of Europe, landlords were not a significant factor in the evolution of the agrarian economy of the northern Netherlands in the late Middle Ages. Instead, an ecological crisis precipitated a transformation of the peasant economy in the direction of capitalism. The subjugation of these agricultural producers to dependence on the market, and the rise of a large market-dependent population involved in trade and industry, occurred as part of a single process of agricultural transformation. The progressive conversion of the low-lying peat soils of the northern Netherlands to grain agriculture in the late Middle Ages led to a settling of the peat and a rise in the moisture content of the soil. The land became unfit for the production of bread grains like winter wheat. Producers were forced to turn toward cattle farming, dairying and the extensive cultivation of summer grains. Farmers retained possession of the land, but lost the option of subsistence farming. As a result, they were forced into dependence on the market for their inputs. They became subject to competitive pressure, and obliged as a result to enter sectors of production that maximized return. In short, they were transformed into market-dependent capitalist farmers: heller maintext.indd 112 6/7/2011 11:50:58 AM bourgeois revolution 113 the peasants of the maritime Northern Low Countries had had no intention of bringing about a transition from pre-capitalism to capitalism. But as an unintended consequence of the acts of reclamation … they ended up undercutting the ability of the soil to support production for subsistence and transforming themselves into market-dependent capitalist farmers.22 Instead of producing bread grains, they had to buy them, and were able to do so by producing in an increasingly efficient way specialized food products (cheese, butter, meat, barley, hops) for sale in the burgeoning markets found in the towns and cities of the southern Netherlands. Growing imports of grain from Eastern Europe lowered the cost of food and increased the farmers’ discretionary purchasing power as well as that of the expanding urban populations. In addition, many farmers supplemented their income by finding employment in ship-building, fishing, tanning leather, brick-making and so on. Cheap food and low wages favoured urbanization and the emergence of competitive industries like beer-making and wool cloth manufacture. By 1500 half the population lived in towns, and the level of full-fledged proletarianization in the northern maritime provinces likely stood at 50 percent. If ultimately Holland had to cede pride of place to England, it was because, unlike the latter, it remained too dependent on international markets. These were still based on feudal relations of production, and were overcome by the economic downturn of the seventeenth century. Relative to England, Holland was dragged down by the crisis. Brenner’s account is in itself a tour de force: all the more so, as it is punctuated by a systematic critique of the objections offered by the distinguished Dutch economic historians at the conference. In the course of making his case for Dutch capitalism, Brenner takes account, for the first time, of the insistence of some Marxist scholars of the importance of peasant differentiation to the development of capitalism. He acknowledges that this occurred in the northern Netherlands, albeit as a consequence of market competition rather than through such competition and deliberately regressive taxation. Brenner also touches on the Dutch revolt, but sees its consequences largely in economic terms. Immigration of skilled craftspeople from the south allowed the Dutch wool cloth industry to become internationally competitive. The abandonment by many merchants and financiers of Antwerp for Amsterdam made the latter city the focal point of world trade and finance. heller maintext.indd 113 6/7/2011 11:50:58 AM 114 the birth o f capitalism In Brenner’s account there is no recognition of the importance of the revolutionary struggle against Hapsburg political absolutism and the Counter-Reformation, or of the long war of national liberation. Nonetheless, Brenner’s analysis greatly strengthens the view of the Dutch Revolt not simply as a bourgeois but as an authentically capitalist revolution. Earlier we have seen that Dutch Marxist historians regarded the triumph of the middle class in the northern Netherlands as the result of the fortuitous weakness of both the nobility and the proletariat compared with the southern Netherlands. But clearly from Brenner’s analysis it can be inferred that the Dutch revolution triumphed because the northern economy was strongly capitalist, having a capitalist agriculture as its foundation. Moreover, contrary to his view of England, where the initiative lay in the hands of the landlords, according to Brenner, it was the rural and urban middle class who held the initiative both economically and politically in Holland. Finally, Brenner’s view of Dutch capitalism tends to undercut his earlier insistence on the exclusive importance of the increase in the extraction of relative surplus value or gains in labour productivity to capitalist development. As he clearly acknowledges, the advance towards capitalism in Holland was heavily dependent on the availability of cheap grain from the periphery of Wallerstein’s world economy lying east of the Elbe – grain which was the product of a serf economy based on a regime of absolute exploitation. Brenner’s view of Holland as a capitalist country was unacceptable to Wood, who, we can recall, had previously dismissed the notion that seventeenth-century Holland was capitalist. For her, grain from east of the Elbe represented a subsidy to Dutch farmers, reducing competitive pressures on them. According to her, unrelenting competition for all inputs was a sine qua non for capitalist accumulation based on the extraction of relative surplus value. Moreover, the Dutch resorted to direct and indirect violence to retain their commercial dominance. In Holland producers, including farmers, were apparently not fully subject to the competitive pressures associated with capitalism because it was the subsidy provided by low-cost Eastern grain that allowed them to produce higher-cost farm commodities like cheese and meat. Likewise, in the international marketplace the Dutch did not so much compete in the market as relied on direct and indirect coercion to maintain their privileged commercial position. More in sorrow than anger, Wood responded to Brenner.23 The main thrust of her reply was to fully elaborate her understanding of what a completely competitive market consists of, and to heller maintext.indd 114 6/7/2011 11:50:58 AM bourgeois revolution 115 reiterate that England is the only early modern instance of such an economy. In particular, she insisted that cheap grain from Eastern Europe belied the notion that Holland was a capitalist economy: ‘the influence of low-cost grain producing regions, which benefited the Dutch even more than other economies, if anything reduced competitive pressures by lowering the costs of basic inputs’.24 But in my view this is tantamount to arguing that low prices for oil from the under-developed world based on imperialist relations meant that the Western European and American economies in the twentieth century were not fully capitalist. Wood is loath to accept the obvious truth that extra-economic factors have always been at work in the history of capitalism. She goes so far as to argue that the Republic’s power was enhanced in large part by devoting much of its tax revenues to military ventures that gave it advantages in international trade that were not based on strictly market criteria. Therefore, according to her, Holland was not capitalist. The economism and ahistoricity of such a view is remarkable. As we have seen, Marx singled out the relationship between military spending and the national debt, which he considered important to understanding the way that capitalist primitive accumulation worked in Holland and elsewhere. Like Arrighi, furthermore, recent Dutch scholarship has linked heavy military spending with state policies of consciously stimulating economic demand.25 the PolItIcal marxIsts In the case of Holland, Brenner clearly kept a distance from Wood. Wood, Teschke and Comninel all based their views on Brenner’s original conception of the genesis of capitalism. They especially took to heart his view of the distinctiveness of capitalist markets as not merely encouraging, but necessitating increases in labour productivity.26 Bois described Brenner’s view rather dismissively as a type of political Marxism which ignored the material foundation of class capacities. Nonetheless, the scholars who followed in the footsteps of Brenner adopted the designation Political Marxism as a badge of honour. Coming to prominence in the wake of the collapse of Soviet Marxism and the triumph of neoliberalism, these researchers made it a point to question commonly accepted orthodoxies on the left, including the notion of bourgeois revolution.27 Despite breaking with the consensus of Political Marxism over the question of capitalism in Holland, Brenner’s perfunctory treatment of the political and social dimension of the Dutch Revolution heller maintext.indd 115 6/7/2011 11:50:58 AM 116 the birth o f capitalism conformed to this group’s overall dismissal of the importance of the notion of bourgeois revolution. According to Marx and Engels, early capitalist development in England and France climaxed in bourgeois revolution. In Teschke’s view this conception assumed a self-conscious and united class, the bourgeoisie, as the main agent of the revolution. Teschke’s conception that Marx thought of the bourgeoisie as self-aware and unified at the moment of revolution requires immediate correction. As Marx described the revolutionaries of seventeenth-century England and eighteenth-century France in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, they did not understand their projects explicitly in class terms, but rather in terms of the Bible or the Roman Republic.28 That the ideology of these revolutionaries was to be found in the political ambiguities of evangelical Protestantism or Roman republicanism suggests not full class consciousness but a consciousness which reflects a class in the making, or one seeking to bridge differences between classes, or perhaps both. That Marx pointed this out reflects a more sophisticated understanding of class and its relation to concrete history than Teschke supposes. Teschke noted that, as a result of what he termed the revisionist attack on the idea of bourgeois revolution, the Political Marxists, in contrast to other Marxist currents, had jettisoned the concept of bourgeois revolution.29 The nexus between capitalism and the bourgeoisie in the case of the English and French revolutions or other bourgeois revolutions had to be severed.30 In other words, the tide of scholarship which put into question the reality of a so-called bourgeoisie and of a bourgeois revolution was such that Marxists had no real choice but to abandon the idea of a bourgeois revolution. The fact that much of this revisionist scholarship in both English-speaking and French academia emanated from liberal or conservative sources that might have reasons other than academic for arguing against the concept of bourgeois revolution did not trouble Teschke. Teschke was not bothered either that the notion of jettisoning the idea of bourgeois revolution meant throwing out the most revolutionary component of the Marxist theory of history, or the element most intimately linked with the expectation of future proletarian revolution. The conception of bourgeois as well as proletarian revolution assumes that underclasses can acquire sufficient economic and political power to overthrow the ruling class. Political Marxism suggests that the economic and political initiative in the advance of history always remains with the ruling class. Indeed, in the eyes of heller maintext.indd 116 6/7/2011 11:50:58 AM bourgeois revolution 117 Political Marxists, in the case of late medieval France, the one case in which the lower class was most successful in class war, success in holding onto the land condemned it to an interminable economic stagnation and tyranny under the Ancien Régime. Nonetheless, Teschke is certain that the weight of historical evidence and the theoretical arguments of the Political Marxists have shown that ‘while the English revolution was not bourgeois, it was capitalist; and while the French Revolution was bourgeois, it was not capitalist. This re-interpretation presents a fundamental breakthrough for Marxism.’31 It might be a breakthrough for academic Marxism, and if it were historically correct we would be obliged to respect it. But it can hardly be counted a triumph for revolutionary Marxism, or for what Dobb referred to as the revolutionary view of world history. Rather the position of the Political Marxists on revolution appears to be what the French refer to as a fuite en avant, or headlong retreat in the face not of historical facts but of neoliberalism. What is the link between neoliberalism and Political Marxism? There undoubtedly is one, although it is indirect. I would argue that neoliberalism shaped the overall intellectual zeitgeist of the last decades. Neoliberalism itself is profoundly antihistorical, being a set of policies that seek to deny the profoundly unstable economic history of capitalism and especially unfettered capitalism. Postmodernism proved a major collaborator, and it too was deeply antihistorical, as Ellen Wood helped to show.32 It was in this atmosphere that not coincidentally historical revisionism came to the fore in both England and France. In the milieu of professional historians there could be no thought of repudiating history itself. But what postmodernism was to the literary disciplines, revisionism was to academic history. Occupying strategic places in academic and cultural life, historical revisionists gained enormous influence by exploiting certain lacunae in the Marxist accounts of the English and French revolutions. Indeed we must admit that this way of looking at things produced a significant body of real scholarship on the English and French Revolutions through the creation of a veritable school of history on both sides of the Atlantic. A Marxist view of the English and French Revolutions became a laughing stock in such quarters. Given the power of such an institutionalized academic viewpoint, it is not surprising that some who abided by Marxism capitulated to revisionism. Yet at its core revisionism, including Political Marxism, is a rejection of the significance of revolution. Above all it is a repudiation of the revolutionary heller maintext.indd 117 6/7/2011 11:50:58 AM 118 the birth o f capitalism aspirations of the 1960s, the more so as a Marxist view of the bourgeois revolutions is still vibrant, as we shall see. england Teschke’s notion of the English Revolution is based on Brenner’s account. The latter begins by delineating in much greater detail than Teschke the development of Marx’s theory of bourgeois revolution. After describing its early permutations, Brenner claims that in The Communist Manifesto – following the liberal French historians of the nineteenth century, François Mignet, Augustin Thierry and François Guizot – Marx reached his mature conception of the bourgeois revolution. It was based on the development of the forces of production under the command of an emergent bourgeoisie. At first allying with the monarchy to curb the feudal nobility, the maturing bourgeoisie ultimately entered into opposition to the monarchy – the latter counterposing itself to their increasing economic and social demands, and falling back on the support of the nobles: ‘Marx has the bourgeoisie and absolute monarchy entering into alliance in the early modern period in order to destroy their common enemy, the parasitic feudal nobility. Then, as the bourgeoisie grew in strength the absolute monarchy gravitated back toward the old nobility.’33 By overthrowing both monarchy and nobility, the bourgeois revolution cleared away the remaining obstacles to its progress, as well as that of the capitalist economy. Brenner takes an entirely different tack, based on a class determinism which stresses the initiative of the landlords. Basing himself on a reading of the Grundrisse and Capital, he claims that that far from production governing property or class relations, the character of production was itself conditioned by the established structure of property relations.34 In accord with his theory of the predominant role of landlords dating from the outcome of the class struggles of the late Middle Ages, Brenner insists that they took the lead in the process by which peasant producers were reduced to market dependence in the sixteenth century. The landlords assumed the initiative in instituting primitive accumulation and creating a class of capitalist tenant farmers who took up competitive leases, while most subsistence peasants were driven off the land and were forced into selling their labour for wages. In the process the conditions were created for further capitalist accumulation.35 Brenner then concludes that Marx’s account of landlord-inspired primitive accumulation undermines the foundations of his theory heller maintext.indd 118 6/7/2011 11:50:58 AM bourgeois revolution 119 of bourgeois revolution, as the landlords themselves removed the remaining fetters on capitalist development. The logic of his account of Marx’s conception of primitive accumulation was to render bourgeois revolution superfluous: ‘Marx’s idea of the so-called primitive accumulation … appeared to undermine the historical and theoretical foundations of the theory of bourgeois revolution.’36 It is against this background that Brenner undertook a review of the historiography of the English Revolution. As he explains, the traditional social interpretation of the revolution was developed by R. H. Tawney, Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone in the 1940s and 1950s.37 It roughly follows Marx’s forces of production approach, with the addition of Tawney’s notion of the rise of the gentry, or emergence of an agrarian capitalist class headed by the lesser nobility or gentry. This social interpretation collapsed because its supporters could not prove that in the seventeenth century the landed class divided between capitalist and feudal landlords, or that these two groups split along political lines during the crisis of the English Revolution. According to Brenner, Stone’s Crisis of the Aristocracy played a key role in discrediting the social interpretation.38 In particular Stone took issue with Tawney’s rise of the gentry thesis, arguing that the rise of the lesser nobles and eclipse of the aristocracy was only a transitory phenomenon. He argued that it was not a question of the aristocracy in crisis, but of the aristocracy in the process of successful political and economic transformation. By the beginning of the seventeenth century almost all of the greater nobles had abandoned the lordly or feudal mode of reproduction, and in consequence were improving their economic prospects. Unable to collect rent any longer by means of extra-economic coercion, as under feudalism, the aristocracy took the lead in the process of primitive accumulation and the imposition of economic rents on their land.39 In describing this process of aristocratic renewal, Stone helped to undermine the traditional social interpretation of the English Civil War as a revolt by a new bourgeoisie which had arisen in the interstices of the feudal order against a still largely feudal ruling aristocracy.40 Based on Stone, Brenner rejects the traditional social interpretation of the English Revolution. On the other hand, in his justly acclaimed Merchants and Revolution Brenner also refuses to accept the conclusion that the revolution had no social and economic basis, as claimed by the revisionists.41 Rather he sees the conflict as having been between what he calls the patrimonial monarchy and its diverse group of supporters, including merchants and nobles, and heller maintext.indd 119 6/7/2011 11:50:58 AM 12 0 the birth o f capitalism an opposition which also included merchants and nobles. Like its counterpart in France, the patrimonial English monarchy sought to establish control over the country by, among other measures, being able to directly extract surplus from the rural population. An alliance of capitalist landlords, merchants and others ranged themselves in opposition to this project. It was this group rather than a class that triumphed through the revolution.42 In speaking about the monarchy, Brenner uses the term ‘patrimonial’. This usage, stemming from Max Weber, allows him to distance himself from Dobb’s and Anderson’s view that the early modern monarchy in England was still feudal, or if you like the last rampart of feudalism. To admit this would be to undercut his view that England was already a capitalist country in the sixteenth century. The term patrimonial is meant to suggest the gap between the monarchy and the landlords, who in Brenner’s view are capitalists.43 Yet, in seeming contradiction, he is also forced to admit that like the French monarchy, his so-called English patrimonial state was the negation of capitalism – its project constituting a fundamental barrier to the further development of capitalism. Hence the issue in the English Revolution was removing the remaining barriers to the future of capitalism. In other words, we can say that, far from the English Revolution being, at best, icing on the capitalist cake, its outcome was critical to its future development. Brenner’s view seems quite contradictory. But overall it puts him in the camp of revisionism, rejecting the idea that the English Revolution was a bourgeois revolution as understood by Marx. As one would expect, Wood follows Brenner closely. Calling the English Revolution ‘bourgeois’, she claims, requires a definition so vague and general as to empty it of meaning. In passing we might note that ‘noble’ is likewise a rather vague, broad and historically disputed term, which nonetheless, like the term ‘bourgeoisie’, refers to the fundamental Marxist notion of class. According to Wood, if the revolution advanced the development of capitalism it was by consolidating the position of the already capitalist landlords, who in any case were already dominant in society and the state. It was a case of pushing on an open door. The revolution was not a class struggle that gave victory to a capitalist bourgeoisie against a ruling class that was thwarting its progress. The class struggle that did occur in the revolution was between the ruling class and subordinate popular forces. The latter’s class interest had as much to do with opposing as promoting the progress of those capitalist landlords or their bourgeois allies. Yet Wood notes that this view heller maintext.indd 120 6/7/2011 11:50:58 AM bourgeois revolution 121 does not deny the role of capitalist tenant farmers in the development of capitalism. What it does deny is the connection between this reality and the revolution.44 Whatever Wood may say on this latter point, the fact is that in Brenner’s version of the development of agrarian capitalism, stress is overwhelmingly laid on the role of the landlords as increasingly the recipients of capitalist rents, rather than on the economic initiative of capitalist farmers. As to the role of the landlords during the revolution, Stone had claimed that no correlation has emerged between noble political alignments during the revolution and their degree of economic enterprise.45 Yet Norah Carlin considers the actual statistical evidence offered by Stone in support of this sweeping claim – so important to Brenner – to be surprisingly unimpressive.46 Moreover, if we focus on the nobility of the northwest of England, the most substantial base of royalist support during the Civil War, they turn out to be less enterprising, less wealthy and less well educated than their brethren in the south.47 Indeed, Andrew Bell Appleby has shown that whereas in the south landlords were encouraging the development of agricultural capitalism, those in the royalist heartland of the northwest took the lead in a seigneurial reaction against the peasantry.48 Roger Manning does not deny that many landlords across England encouraged their tenants to make improvements in order to meet their so-called economic rents. On the other hand, as part of the same process many others practised what he describes as a fiscal seigneurialism which had nothing to do with positive economic initiatives. As such they inspired ongoing popular protest.49 But the important point surely is that, contrary to Brenner’s and Stone’s view, not all landlords in England, and especially not in the royalist bastion of the northwest, can be considered capitalist landlords. As such this region must be seen as constituting a crucial economic and social base of royalist political support. the caPItalIst farmers In marx As we have noted, in Brenner’s version of the development of agrarian capitalism it is the passive role he assigns to capitalist farmers, in contrast to the aristocratic class, that is notable. On the contrary, in chapter 29 of Volume One of Capital, entitled ‘Genesis of the capitalist farmer’, Marx places most of the emphasis on the appearance of rural capitalists as the principal agents of emerging capitalism, with the landlords playing a secondary role.50 Prior to the sixteenth century the circumstances and size of their farms were still limited. Both farmers and wage labourers who still maintained heller maintext.indd 121 6/7/2011 11:50:58 AM 12 8 the birth o f capitalism According to Comninel, a class that based itself on profit did not exist in France prior to 1789. Appropriation of surplus value by a bourgeoisie did not occur. Both the nobility and the bourgeoisie based themselves on rent and income from state offices. As a result, Comninel believes that the two groups must be regarded as members of a single class. Hence, the conflict that did break out between the bourgeoisie and the nobility in 1789 was essentially an interelite struggle rather than a class conflict.61 On this point Comninel is in complete accord with leading conservative revisionists of the French Revolution. Comninel rejects the idea that capitalist farming existed on the large tenant farms of northern France that operated on the basis of wage labour and profit. He disallows the idea that such operations were capitalist because the labour force was kept dependent on its own subsistence production rather than being fully proletarianized. Furthermore, the process of production was blocked from expansion and improvement of the means of production by a whole body of traditional practices, rights and obligations.62 Wood, Comninel’s thesis supervisor, found these arguments persuasive. The French Revolution may have been bourgeois but it was not capitalist. Prior to the French Revolution capitalist conditions did not exist.63 rural caPItalIsm Like Brenner, Comninel and Wood rightly emphasize the existence of an agrarian capitalism and a rural bourgeoisie as a sine qua non for the existence of capitalism. But in Chapter 2 we saw that such a capitalism did consolidate itself in France at the end of the sixteenth century. Moreover, despite the triumph of the absolute state and a heavy burden of rent and taxes, this bourgeoisie persisted in the seventeenth century alongside a commercial and even manufacturing bourgeoisie. It re-emerged with new vigour in the eighteenth century.64 We have seen that Comninel denied that the tenant farmers of the rich grain lands of northern France were capitalists. Yet in the eighteenth century the Physiocrat Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot described them as ‘agricultural capitalist entrepreneurs’. These rich peasants who rented large farms favoured a free market in grain, as espoused by Turgot. They organized production using their own tools and equipment. At the same time, they employed a workforce paid in wages. Based on their operations, they derived a profit and as a result paid the landlords what amounted to a capitalist rent.65 Indeed, the farmers of such enterprises had to pay not only these rents, but usually also seigneurial dues, taxes and tithes. But since heller maintext.indd 128 6/7/2011 11:50:58 AM bourgeois revolution 12 9 their farms were on fertile lands that were close to good roads and towns, they were able to take advantage of high prices and to enjoy profitable returns. Yet they often enhanced their revenues by farming ecclesiastical tithes and seigneurial obligations. As such, the incomes of such farmers were made up of both capitalist profits and feudal rents. They also earned money from taking interest on loans to poorer peasants. Through their business and social connections and their lifestyle, these farmers constituted part of the bourgeoisie alongside those of the middle class who lived in the surrounding bourgs and towns. Jean-Marc Moriceau describes these wealthy farmers in the Ile de France as attaining the level of a kind of gentry in the eighteenth century.66 In northern France this elite of wealthy farmers constituted a minority among the more numerous and broader group of prosperous peasant ploughmen or labourers. On a lesser scale than the wealthy farmers, they too hired wage labour and loaned grain, ploughs, wagons and money to their less well-off neighbours. As such, they too were part of an emergent class of rural capitalists. More generally, we can say that the French countryside even in the south and west saw a halting and tentative progress toward capitalist relations in agriculture and the development of an agrarian bourgeoisie.67 Moriceau notes that in the Ile de France and over much of the rest of the north of France, genuine agricultural improvement took place. Especially in regions close to cities that were affected by new agronomic ideas and by the growing availability of manure, productivity significantly increased in the second half of the eighteenth century.68 The idea of introducing agronomic improvements spread to the better-off peasants through the increasing influence of country postmasters, who often were themselves successful farmers. The intrusion of capitalism played an important role in destabilizing the countryside and mobilizing the rural population on the eve of the revolution. Capitalist farmers emerged as the leaders of the rural revolution. the rIse of PolItIcal economy In the years leading up to the revolution, capitalism emerged rapidly not only in agriculture, but also in industry, as we shall see.69 These dramatic economic changes and the incipient financial and economic crisis of this period produced a remarkable outpouring of economic literature. Between 1750 and 1789 some 2,200 books on political heller maintext.indd 129 6/7/2011 11:50:58 AM 13 0 the birth o f capitalism economy were published in France, with 804 appearing in 1789 alone.70 These numbers testify to the reality of profound economic change. Led by François Quesnay and Turgot, the leading economists of the time organized themselves into the so-called Physiocratic School. The Physiocrats based themselves on the theory that value, or as they put it net product, derived from the land. At the same time they were fervently committed to laissez-faire within the framework of a so-called legal despotism – an idealized version of the Ancien Régime. Marx had high praise for the Physiocratic School, seeing them as the first economists to sketch a theory of surplus value.71 According to a recent study of the school by Gianni Vaggi, profit was a systematic feature of the Physiocratic understanding of the so-called net product or surplus.72 Indeed, the decades leading up to the revolution saw the evolution of Physiocratic teaching in the direction of explicitly capitalist conceptions. Following Quesnay, Nicole Baudeau, a popularizer of Physiocratic doctrine, demonstrated the productive potential of free or wage labour and of the capitalist entrepreneur in both farming and manufacture.73 As is well known, another Quesnay disciple, Turgot, actually attempted to introduce a free market in grain and labour during his tenure as controllergeneral and minister of finance. Indeed, it is in Turgot’s writings that we witness the transformation of Physiocratic teaching from an economic theory based on agriculture into a theory of capitalism proper. This was simply a reaction on the part of a sophisticated economic thinker, on the one hand, to the increasing pervasiveness of capitalist farming based on wage labour, and on the other hand, to the growth of manufacturing.74 In his principal work, Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses (1766), Turgot repeatedly underlines his fealty to the basic principles of Physiocratic theory. Nonetheless, in a backwards and forwards manner, Turgot moves toward a recognition of the value-creating potential of both industry and agriculture, of the essential role of capital to the activity of farmers and manufacturers, and to the common condition of agricultural and farm workers, both of whom were competing to sell their labour to employers in return for a wage.75 In Turgot’s work the primary focus becomes not land as a material entity that produces wealth, but capital as a value which attempts to expand and realize itself whether in farming or manufacture.76 At the same time, Turgot explicitly acknowledges the more productive and advanced form of capitalist agriculture based on capitalism, prevalent throughout the north of France where heller maintext.indd 130 6/7/2011 11:50:58 AM bourgeois revolution 131 competitive leases were the rule.77 While Turgot harked back to the notion of the net product at various points in the Réflections, he increasingly acknowledged the role of profit in capitalist activity.78 Turgot’s economic principles, like those of other French theorists of the time, were a reflection and theorization of what had already emerged in French society, and which he hoped would develop further. The Physiocrats were not without their critics. Jean-Joseph-Louis Graslin and Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès rejected altogether the idea that land was the source of wealth. On the contrary, they asserted that it was labour which was the true source of wealth. Labour in both agriculture and industry produced value.79 The position of Sieyès in this respect had important political implications. In the Physiocratic scheme elaborated under the Ancien Régime the landed proprietors enjoyed a special place as receivers of the net product. But in the social order described in Sieyès’s justly famous revolutionary pamphlet Qu’est-ce que le tiers etat? this group simply vanishes. Wage labour In france The growing prominence of a labour theory of value was directly tied to the increasing dependence of most of the population on wages. But, according to Comninel, no true proletariat existed because the wage-earning class, which Comninel acknowledges existed, was required to live off its own subsistence. An authentic proletariat must be dependent on the market for its means of subsistence as well as be wage-based. As a matter of fact, Comninel’s concept of a wageearning class living off its own subsistence appears to be a bit of a contradiction in terms. If wage workers in eighteenth-century France could sustain themselves through their own subsistence, why did they turn to wage work in increasing numbers? As we have already seen, the rural wage-earning class in eighteenth-century France in fact did not, and could not, live off its own subsistence. That is why it turned more and more to wage work. It is true that many rural workers had gardens and were able to glean and forage for a certain portion of their subsistence. It is this possibility that Comninel points out. Nonetheless, a substantial part of the food, and eventually even the clothing and household articles of rural workers, had to be obtained by spending money in the market. Money – indispensable to subsistence – was only available to the labouring classes through the sale of their labour power in the market in return for wages. Consequently, the sale of labour in heller maintext.indd 131 6/7/2011 11:50:58 AM 132 the birth o f capitalism return for wages was an intrinsic feature of the eighteenth-century economy. Moreover, dependence on wages seems to have increased among the rural population throughout the century. Following from this growing importance of wage labour, the role of surplus value or capitalist profit produced by wage workers composed an expanding element in the eighteenth-century French economy. Comninel’s view is perhaps based on the purist idea that a true proletarian is one who not only must sell all their labour power in the market, but also one who must buy all their means of subsistence in the market as well. Comninel apparently would have us believe that the rural labouring population prior to the revolution was not proletarianized because it did not obtain all means of subsistence from the market. While the degree of wage dependency varies depending on time and place, it is also true historically that growing dependency on wages entails a progressive loss of control over the means of production on the part of producers as capitalism develops. From Comninel’s quite unhistorical and mechanistic perspective, proletarians, and hence capitalism, either do or do not exist. From this standpoint it is impossible to distinguish, over time, degrees of wage dependence as the capitalist economy evolves. In Comninel’s view the working class comes into being fully developed ex nihilo or it does not exist at all. There is no making of the working class through the vicissitudes and contradictions of concrete history. Indeed, Comninel contrasts eighteenth-century French peasant producers with what he represents as a truly proletarianized English rural workforce who are consequently utterly dependent on the market. Eighteenthcentury England is pictured, in contrast to France, as a place where a fully rational agrarian capitalism existed.80 That this was far from having been the case has recently been shown, for example, by J. M. Nesson. Not only did commons rights largely survive in England into the nineteenth century, even a peasantry continued to exist, according to Nesson.81 In the decade prior to the outbreak of the revolution, the influence of the Physiocrats waned. Turgot continued to be read, but now alongside the work of Adam Smith, whose reputation grew larger and larger on the eve of the revolution.82 Successive editions of his work appeared, and his ideas became an important part of the ideological context in which the National Legislative Assembly swept away feudalism and imposed a legal framework of liberal capitalism based on the principles of constitutional government.83 The growing popularity of Smith in France was not simply a heller maintext.indd 132 6/7/2011 11:50:58 AM bourgeois revolution 133 reflection of the popularity of British liberal ideas. It was a response to the fact that in the four decades prior to the revolution, capitalism, which had been weak and underground, suddenly surged powerfully to the surface. It is precisely the rapidity of such change that engendered revolution. the revolutIonary crIsIs There can be no question about the existence of agrarian capitalism on the eve of the revolution of 1789. On this basis there occurred a tremendous expansion of commerce, especially foreign and overseas commerce. Manufacture also grew spectacularly. The investment of capital and the reorganization of manufacture in the direction of concentration and centralization of production were especially notable in mining and cotton and chemical manufacturing. As a consequence in the last decades prior to the revolution there took place an enormous growth of the role of profit in the economy, and the power and influence of the economic bourgeoisie.84 In the actual revolution the regime of aristocratic privilege and feudalism was swept away, and the legal and political superstructure of society was reorganized in order to facilitate capital accumulation. The continued entrenchment of feudalism under the absolute monarchy and the overwhelming popular revolution against it made the revolution an event of epochal scale.85 On the basis of this tremendous upheaval the bourgeoisie assumed power. Moreover, there was a clear consciousness that the bourgeoisie had taken power. Ongoing industrialization and the experience of the Revolution helped to create the beginnings of working-class consciousness as well.86 conclusIon In summary I have reasserted the classic Marxist view of the Dutch, English and French revolutions as capitalist and bourgeois revolutions. The emergence of the territorial state after 1500 in France and England was critical to the initial development of capitalism in these two places. In Holland such a state was produced by its prolonged revolutionary struggle. Few would deny the growing strength of capitalism in England. We have likewise established its growing presence in Holland and France prior to their revolutions. Sixteenth-century monarchies had based themselves on the support of landlord nobles in the first instance, but also drew support from heller maintext.indd 133 6/7/2011 11:50:58 AM 134 the birth o f capitalism merchants and an emerging layer of manufacturers and rural capitalists. But at a certain point the growing power of these embryonic capitalists came into conflict with the increasingly absolutist rule of the Hapsburg, Stuart and Bourbon monarchies. The latter hemmed in the further development of capitalism and the social and political aspirations of a still young and emergent bourgeoisie. Increasingly these monarchies fell back on the landlords and more conservative elements of the merchant class for support. In the revolutionary crises, in each instance the lead was taken not by the established merchants, who tended to support the existing regime or sit on the fence, but by lesser merchants and better-off petty producers, urban but also rural. As a result of revolution, the state was restructured in each case to enhance the further accumulation of capital at home and abroad, and to advance the social and political ambitions of the bourgeoisie. By transforming the state from a feudal to a capitalist institution, the revolutions in Holland, England and France helped to consolidate capitalism as a system. In taking this view we have challenged the view of Brenner and the Political Marxists, who would deny the significance and even the existence of these bourgeois and capitalist revolutions. These early modern revolutions exemplify the formation of a capitalism from below, which was likewise seen in the United States following its revolution. These were classic bourgeois and capitalist revolutions, which we would argue were indispensable to the full flowering of capitalism. But even in the case of Holland, England and France capitalism was facilitated by state support in the form of mercantilism, colonialism and colonial slavery. Indeed, their revolutions intensified such state support. Beyond this are cases like Scotland and Prussia in the eighteenth century, where another possible passage to capitalism occurred, based on a type of revolution from above instituted by the state and the landlord class. It is to a consideration of the role of the state in supporting or instituting capitalism that we turn in the next chapter. heller maintext.indd 134 6/7/2011 11:50:58 AM 5 PolItIcal caPItalIsm The Dutch, English and French Revolutions were both popular and bourgeois-capitalist revolutions. The petty producers, especially the emergent or proto-capitalist element, were paramount in these capitalist revolutions from below. In this chapter we take up Lenin’s contrast between such ‘capitalisms from below’ and ‘capitalisms from above’. The outlines of these contrasting historical paths derive from Lenin’s conceptual elaboration of Marx’s contrast between the revolutionary petty-producer-led transition and the non-revolutionary merchant-led transition to capitalism. In fact Lenin’s stress on the rural petty producers as key to the emergence of capitalism from below echoes across the previously discussed original transition debate, influencing the views of Dobb and Hilton on the transition in England. England has been my prime example of the installation of capitalism largely from below. While gentry, landlords and merchants had their part, I have insisted that the main dynamic of the transition came from the grassroots. But it will be one of this chapter’s main purposes to break from an Anglocentric view of capitalist origins and to extend our understanding of such beginnings by introducing a comparative perspective. I have already shown that the revolutionary path of capitalism from below applies to Holland and France as well as England. Following Lenin, I shall show how the phenomenon of capitalism from below extended across the Atlantic to nineteenth-century America in the wake of its revolution. Discussion of the Prussian example as well as the instances of Scotland and Japan allows us to contrast the notion of capitalism from below with that of capitalism from above: that is, capitalism imposed by landlords and the state. Capitalism from above features landlords in control of a state, or a state acting independently, responding to capitalism’s uneven development by consciously producing ‘combined development’, a form of accelerated, conscious and planned development of capitalism. But even capitalisms developing from below were hardly immune to this logic of state intervention. Early modern Holland, England and France adopted policies like mercantilism and 135 heller maintext.indd 135 6/7/2011 11:50:58 AM 13 6 the birth o f capitalism colonialism in the service of capitalist development. Recognizing this is important in opposing Eurocentric and economistic views, which assert that capitalism was an economic system which in its ‘classic’ forms at least did not require fostering by the state, and in particular that colonialism and slavery had little or nothing to do with its development. I argue, on the contrary, that the state played a key role in the development of capitalism, whether from above or below, and that the overseas initiatives of the state represented a crucial step in strengthening European capitalism and vaulting it from economic marginality to world primacy. Throughout the chapter Lenin’s conception of the origin of capitalism based either on the American path from below or the Prussian path from above serves as a key. Following the history of these paths enables me to show that control over the state by bourgeoisie supported by small producers or by landlords helped to determine the character of the capitalism that developed in each instance. A revolution which creates a state like the United States which rests on small producers opens the way to the free play of the market. Under such conditions capitalist relations and forces of production develop most rapidly. But it will be shown that even so the state intervened heavily to support this process. The Prussian instance demonstrates in turn how the state not only intervened to ensure the survival of its nobility, but aided them in making the transition to capitalism at the expense of the peasant producers. As their historical development has recently been fruitfully explored from the point of view of capitalism from above, the examples of Scotland and Japan are discussed with an eye to developing a comparative understanding of alternative routes to capitalism. The decisive role of the state is illustrated by applying Trotsky’s conception of combined and uneven development to the Scottish path to capitalism. It illustrates the speed and contradictory nature of capitalist development in states with archaic social relations. Mercantilism is commonly thought of as an economic policy and doctrine based on state intervention in the economy which was characteristic of the early modern period. I argue that it is as characteristic of modern capitalism as it was of the early modern form. Moreover it exemplifies one of the ways that the coercive role of the state has been used to accelerate the accumulation of capital. Anderson, Wallerstein and Teschke argue that mercantilism reflected the views of a state directed by the nobility. On the contrary, mercantilism was among other things an expression of the interests of a rising bourgeoisie within the absolutist state. Indeed, heller maintext.indd 136 6/7/2011 11:50:58 AM political capitalism 137 its most successful practitioner was capitalist England. Following the seventeenth-century revolution from below, bourgeois economic interests predominated in that state. Colonialism and slavery were two of the most successful features of mercantilism backed and protected by the state. The role of colonialism and slavery in the development of capitalism has been greatly disputed. Discussion of these disputes will open the way for the next chapter, which deals with the Industrial Revolution. lords In the makIng of the modern World In my argument so far, I have made clear that the bourgeois and capitalist revolutions in Holland, England and France opposed absolutist regimes based on the landlord class. This was true even of the Spanish monarchy’s intervention in the Low Countries in light of the European-wide aristocratic social and political base of the Hapsburgs. The foundation of the royalist cause in England, likewise, was the landed class. While there were capitalist landlords in England, most landlords supported the monarchy, and only a minority supported Parliament. The main social base of the revolutionary party was rural and urban petty producers as well as merchants and manufacturers. Moreover, it was principally from this same social element that agrarian and manufacturing capitalism emerged. In emphasizing the bourgeois and capitalist character of these early revolutions, I have opposed the arguments of Brenner and his followers that it was landlords who played the main role in ushering in capitalism in England, for Brenner the first and classic path of capitalist development. Now I aim to put the role landlords did play in the development of capitalism in perspective. While it was not central in the English case, it was in other places. And this difference in the social character of the regimes that opened the way for capitalism made a lasting political difference: they contributed to the emergence of modern democratic political orders or to twentiethcentury fascisms, or determined that modern class struggle would assume the form of Gramscian wars of position or of movement. The origins of modern dictatorship or democracy are the central problematic of Barrington Moore’s famous Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World.1 Though urban merchant and industrial capitalists were involved, the political destiny of modern states was determined by agrarian social relations, according to Moore. In the early modern revolutions discussed by Moore, including England, heller maintext.indd 137 6/7/2011 11:50:58 AM 240 the birth o f capitalism on such capital movements, the sequence has been more or less confirmed by Braudel and Richard Goldthwaite.68 It is to Harvey’s credit that he has brought this geographical dimension of the historical movement of capital to the fore. Nonetheless, this spatial displacement of capital should be seen in light of Marx’s more fundamental notion of uneven development, which he considered a characteristic feature of capitalism. We can recall that it was uneven development that marked the genesis of capitalism in backward Western Europe emerging out of the more civilized parts of Eurasia, as pointed out by Hobsbawm. But we have also observed the characteristic geographic unevenness of capitalist development making itself felt through the concentration of wealth, initially created by widely scattered petty producers, into the hands of early capitalists, whose relatively dispersed points of economic activity ultimately became concentrated in cities like Milan, Paris and London. Moreover, from capitalism’s early spread over Italy, Germany and France we have seen its step-by-step geographical concentration in Holland and England. Spatial fix appears to be one feature of this overall tendency toward uneven development, which seems to be related to opportunities to make and sustain profits, or the lack thereof. caPItalIsm versus humanIty and nature Amiya Kumar Bagchi’s Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital looks at the global impact of the development of capitalism from the perspective of global human development.69 As such it helps to transcend the divide between Eurocentric and non-Eurocentric conceptions of history. Bagchi, an eminent historian and political economist, rose from humble circumstances to become one of India’s most distinguished social scientists and head of the Institute of Development Studies in Kolkata. Like Frank and Arrighi he denies that Europeans gained any decisive advantage in technology and standard of living over Asia prior to the Industrial Revolution. Until the nineteenth century European manufactures could not compete on equal terms with those of China and India.70 Unlike other critics of Eurocentrism, Bagchi remains committed to a Marxist view of history. Marx’s theoretical works lay out the basic dynamics of capitalist accumulation on a world scale.71 Capitalism is not simply about free trade and free markets. Competition among capitalists and the states that backed them was an integral part of the rise of capitalism in heller maintext.indd 240 6/7/2011 11:51:02 AM capitalism and world h i s t o r y 241 Europe and its spread to the rest of the world. The social relations of production are fundamental to an understanding of the nature of capitalism. Ongoing conflicts between labour and capital continually challenged the uninterrupted accumulation of capital. There is a fundamental difference between a state like Qing China, which reined in the unrestricted accumulation of capital, and one like eighteenth-century England, which promoted the unchecked accumulation of economic power, thereby facilitating the development of factory production.72 But what is truly unique among anti-Eurocentric historians, and indeed all the scholars considered to this point, is Bagchi’s analysis of capitalism from the perspective of human development. Human development he defines as progress toward the achievement of decent levels of health, literacy, political and social freedom and environmental sustainability.73 Economic growth in the form of an expansion of goods and services is positive, but only if leads to global human improvement: ‘I argue that economic growth in the sense of production of more goods and services can be said to be a good thing only if it leads to greater human development.’74 By that measure the development of capitalism was negative even for most Europeans until nearly the end of the nineteenth century. The advantages reaped by the European elites came at the expense of the suffering of millions of people in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Bagchi properly emphasizes the exploitation and ravages of European imperialism and colonialism on non-Europeans, and their role in barring the way to economic development outside of Europe. But his narrative also documents the dispossession and exploitation of the peasant and working-class producers of Europe by emergent capitalism.75 His survey of global demography demonstrates that the development of capitalism has over most of its history been associated with high infant mortality and death rates. Indeed, he shows that Holland’s decline as a leading capitalist power was related to population loss as a result of the unhealthy and dangerous conditions in which workers, including large number of merchant sailors, were forced to live.76 In other words, capitalism has oppressed human beings, whether they were European or non-European. Despite his anti-Eurocentric perspective, Bagchi understands that capitalism has been a system that has inflicted harm on most of humankind including European peasants and workers. Indeed, he makes the important point that if hypothetically the capitalist breakthrough had occurred in India or China, the result would have been the same.77 The political lesson of such a perspective could not be clearer. heller maintext.indd 241 6/7/2011 11:51:02 AM 242 the birth o f capitalism Bagchi admits that damage to the environment occurred prior to the onset of capitalism and colonialism.78 But he demonstrates that Western colonialism inflicted enormous damage to the ecology of China and India. Recently a former student of E. P. Thompson, Peter Linebaugh, has attempted to document the terrible harm inflicted on the natural environment by the destruction of the commons worldwide by capitalism. In his Magna Carta Manifesto (2008) Linebaugh lays stress not so much on the internal dynamics of capitalism, but on its devastation of the commons, which historically has been fundamental to the subsistence economy of the mass of humankind.79 Enclosure of the land entailed the expropriation and privatization not merely of the subsistence holdings of peasant producers, but also of the woodlands, meadowlands and marshlands which were customarily exploited in common. The privatization of such common resources was a key factor in forcing producers to sell their labour for a wage, which as we have seen was in turn critical to the accumulation of capital. But the transformation of the land and its products into commodities meant an economy based on use values was made impossible. More to the point, such expropriation of the commons and conversion of it into private property intensified the exploitation of the natural environment. Over time the exploitation of the environment by capital developed into what Marx called a metabolic rift between capitalist society and nature. Linebaugh convincingly demonstrates the beginnings of this process in the Tudor and Stuart period.80 Deforestation, pollution of the air from coal burning and of the water from industrial and human waste were already problematic in the sixteenth century. But especially impressive is his panoramic description of the step-by-step extension of this process into Africa, India and the Americas until it has engulfed the whole world. Nature has always been a free good for capitalism to dispose of as it saw fit. This was a precondition for the existence of capitalism, and an enormous boon to its operations across five centuries. But at the beginning of the twenty-first century we are approaching the limit of such a framework. The existence of humanity and the planet itself is imperilled if such exploitation of nature continues. heller maintext.indd 242 6/7/2011 11:51:02 AM conclusIon In bringing this discussion of the transition problem to a close, I can offer a number of observations. With respect to the nature of the debate, virtually all of its participants claimed to have been inspired by Marx’s texts. Yet as the initial exchange between Dobb and Sweezy and the subsequent one between Brenner and Wallerstein suggest, they have drawn different conclusions from Marx’s writings. It is my view that in these instances Dobb and Brenner have the better part, in being closer to Marx’s view and the historical evidence. Yet even in this respect Brenner fails to appreciate Marx’s dialectical method. It would have allowed him to appreciate the unity of the process of capitalist accumulation, which entails both the extraction of surplus value through the development of capitalist relations of production(capitalists and workers) and the realization of profit through the development of the market. The latter is posited by the former. In part divergent interpretations of Marx arise from the fact that Marxist scholars bring different political and intellectual agendas to the texts in the first place. Furthermore, the enormous and sometimes contradictory corpus of Marx’s writings fosters the development of opposing viewpoints. The authoritative standing of Marx’s texts, moreover, lends them to different interpretations, as authoritative texts tend to do. Indeed, I would go further in suggesting that the promethean nature of the content and style of Marx’s writings is apt to provoke creative reinterpretations of it in the light of changing circumstances. The intellectual vibrancy of the controversies in the transition debate confirms this point. But rather than lamenting this state of affairs, it should be celebrated as affirming the ongoing intellectual strength of Marxist thought. With respect to the basic themes of this work, I should first insist once more on the protracted nature of the transition which took place over three or more centuries, confirming its gradual nature. There were revolutionary moments – the fourteenth-century class conflicts, the Renaissance, the English and French Revolutions, the Industrial Revolution – when, as a result of long-term underlying changes, quantity became quality and sudden and even violent change took place. Rather than insisting on unending historical continuity or inexplicable revolution, it is important to comprehend the relation or rhythm that exists between slow and long-term 243 heller maintext.indd 243 6/7/2011 11:51:02 AM 244 the birth o f capitalism change and sudden leaps and transformations. The movement from feudalism to capitalism in any case unfolded over many centuries. Although we cannot be specific, it is likely that any transition to socialism, likewise, will take a long time, with many sudden changes, surprises and reversals – the collapse of the Soviet Union being a case in point. In the second place, the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries appear to be the period when the basic commodity categories of capitalism – private property, money, exchange in the competitive market, the concept of labour as the basis of value – consolidated into a new mode of production. Private property – the legal form of the commodity – crystallized into a legal concept in the late seventeenth century. A basic framework for the circulation of money capital and a credit market was created in the same period, with the creation of the Bank of England, a national debt and a stock exchange. A competitive market for land and labour came into existence in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The notion of wage labour as the source of value, in contradistinction to other forms of value, made its appearance in economic treatises in the late seventeenth century. Indeed, the birth of an increasingly sophisticated capitalist political economy from the late seventeenth century onward was an important symptom of capitalism’s maturation. It is important to note that this process of consolidation followed the English Revolution, confirming the importance of revolution at the level of the state as an integral feature of capitalism’s genesis. Just as the English capitalist state consolidated the new mode of production at home, it played an equally decisive role in orchestrating overseas expansion and colonialism. The Industrial Revolution was decisive in European capitalism’s conquest of the rest of the world. The Industrial Revolution and colonialism opened the way for the Great Divergence at the beginning of the nineteenth century which saw the economic triumph of the West over the rest of the world. This triumph was reinforced and extended by the political and military intervention of European imperialism, which crippled non-European economic progress. But the moment of the Great Divergence was also the period of the French Revolution, a capitalist revolution with European and global impact. Among its reverberations was the Haitian Revolution, which dealt a body blow to the emergent capitalism of the French Ancien Régime. The revolution in Haiti, coupled with the Tupac Amaru revolt in the Andes and the Pontiac Revolt in heller maintext.indd 244 6/7/2011 11:51:02 AM conclusion 245 North America, marked the beginning of the long resistance of third world countries to Western colonialism and imperialism. In this account of the transition, it is the petty producers – peasants and urban craftspeople – who figure as central agents of the transition. They were the underclass of the feudal system, whose ambitions were kept in check by heavy rent and other legal and personal restrictions maintained by the upper class. Their combativeness revealed itself during the late medieval crisis and played a key role in the decline of feudalism. At the same time, the removal of feudal constraints allowed the economic ambitions of the better-off small-scale producers to assert themselves. The social splitting of this group was apparent as early as the late fifteenth century, and in the next century led to the birth of two new classes, capitalist farmers and agricultural wage workers. The development of these two largely rural classes was visible in Italy, France and Holland, but above all in sixteenth-century England where it proved critical to the emergence of capitalism. Capitalist farmers, a group whose economic ambitions were evident in the late medieval period, together with well-to-do craftspeople followed a revolutionary path by reorganizing production in both agriculture and industry from the sixteenth century onward. Led by these same proto-capitalist elements, petty producers and wage workers provided the shock troops of the early modern social and political revolutions. Early more or less successful variants of capitalism were manifest in Italy, Germany, France and Holland. The new mode of production finally consolidated itself in England in the course of the seventeenth century. From the beginning the development of the global market played an essential role in both helping to dissolve the vestiges of the feudal system and providing a market for capitalist manufactured commodities. The distinguishing feature of the new mode of production was the use of wage labour, and its employment as variable capital in both agriculture and industry. The new social relations of production made possible capital accumulation on the basis of the extraction of relative as against absolute value. While these advantages were already evident from the sixteenth century, their superiority did not become evident until the eighteenth century. It was only towards the end of the eighteenth century and the onset of the Industrial Revolution that the Great Divergence between this mode of production and those in place elsewhere became clear. Having discussed the origins of capitalism at length and carried his sketch of the history of capitalism down to the twentieth century, Dobb ventured to discuss its future prospects at the conclusion heller maintext.indd 245 6/7/2011 11:51:02 AM 246 the birth o f capitalism of his Studies in the Development of Capitalism. Based on this long perspective, he cautiously took the view that the role of state monopoly capitalism, evident since the beginning of the twentieth century, was bound to increase. The Great Depression of the 1930s and the two World Wars had permanently increased the role of the state in the economy. He also asserted that the influence of the socialist states led by the Soviet Union, and of the countries of the third world, would likely grow. As Dobb presented them, these developments seemed to be the more or less inevitable outcome of a long historical process. The first of these forecasts has been more or less sustained. The role of the state as an instrument of big capital looms larger than ever, especially in the light of the collapse of the recent experiment in global neoliberalism. On the other hand, Dobb’s further prediction about the future influence of the Soviet Union and its allies as well as the under-developed countries represents a cautionary tale of the dangers of historical prediction. The Soviet Union is no more, while with the exception of China and possibly India and Brazil, the economic gap between the developed and under-developed countries has increased rather than diminished.1 Forecasting the future in the wake of the Second World War, the basis of Dobb’s predictions was that the development of state monopoly capitalism, the growing power of the Soviet bloc and the third world states would hem capitalism in and eventually lead to its collapse. The neoliberal experiment that began in the 1980s represented a temporarily successful reaction to these trends. This neoliberal endeavour has collapsed, and the global capitalist system has entered a period of the doldrums if not outright decline. If there is no immediate remedy this period of decay could prove indeterminately prolonged and dark. In my more pessimistic moments I recall Dobb’s own characterization of the decline of feudalism as stretching out over centuries. Writing in 2000 while the neoliberal experiment was still going strong, Guy Bois saw neoliberalism as a symptom of deepening capitalist crisis. Toward the conclusion of his account of the late medieval feudal crisis, Bois offered a qualified comparison between that crisis and the contemporary crisis of capitalism.2 In doing so, Bois was able to suggest the gravity of the current situation from a historical perspective. Like the late medieval crisis, the current state of affairs is marked by ongoing large-scale unemployment, growing insecurity, violence and social marginalization. The two eras are likewise characterized by outbursts of the irrational in the heller maintext.indd 246 6/7/2011 11:51:02 AM conclusion 247 realm of culture in which the existing elites are fully complicit. At the same time, Bois hastened to distinguish the sources of crisis in each case: the one engendered by an insufficiency of production in an economy based on petty production, the other rooted in a crisis of over-production in an economy based on industrial capitalism. According to Bois, the response to this contemporary crisis of over-production at the heart of the economy has been the emergence of a powerful financial capitalism. This financial capitalist regime freed itself from state regulation while subordinating the spheres of commercial and industrial capitalism to itself. In its pursuit of higher and higher rates of return it forced down wages and induced a fall of demand which has exacerbated the problems of the global economy. Meanwhile ongoing unbalanced consumption in the American economy, based on massive debts and commercial deficits, is the linchpin of the system. Financial speculation has propped up the system so far. Published eight years before the bursting of the great financial bubble, Bois’s analysis must be regarded as prescient. Set off by his discussion of the late medieval crisis, it suggests the seriousness of the current situation. Arrighi too offered an analysis of the contemporary crisis. In The Long Twentieth Century, published in 1994, he portrayed the crisis as one of American capitalism but not of capitalism as a whole. Analyzing capitalism’s history, he divided it into four successive hegemonic periods over five centuries, the last of which was the American. Like Bois, Arrighi saw the onset of the recent financial phase of capitalism as a symptom of decline preliminary to the ultimate emergence of a new hegemonic power. In this context, he predicted the rise of a new hegemon in the form of the East Asian powerhouse Japan. By the time he came to publish Adam Smith in Beijing in 2007, he was still convinced that the rising centre of world economic power lay in the East. His bet was now not on Japan but on China. More importantly his new forecast for the first time acknowledged that the capitalist system itself and not simply American capitalism was in crisis. China would lead the way not because it was the embodiment of a new and superior form of capitalist hegemony, but because it offered a form of economic activity that was not only more competitive in the market, but sustainable, in contrast to the energy and capital-intensive economies of the West. The ecological crisis had made such economies into dinosaurs. A global market economy of a sort could continue, but no longer based on capitalism and a regime of political hegemony. Arrighi’s prediction of a non-capitalist future for China should heller maintext.indd 247 6/7/2011 11:51:02 AM 248 the birth o f capitalism be taken with a grain of salt. On the other hand, it does reflect an awareness that the current crisis is not merely a short-term crisis of profits and demand, but a more long-term one involving a crisis of energy shortage and environmental sustainability as well as global governability. In the latter context, no one can rule out the possibility that the current hegemon, the United States, will attempt to hold onto its status by resorting to war against its rivals, and notably against China. It has already demonstrated its willingness to fight for control of the energy resources of the Middle East, and its determination to defend the hegemonic position of the dollar at almost any cost. In the face of its industrial decline and massive international indebtedness, the continuation of the global dollar standard is essential to holding on to its remaining power. While the situation has obviously evolved from that described so clearly and brilliantly by Lenin in Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism, the possibility of conflicts over energy and the control of financial markets between unequal and rival centres of capitalist accumulation cannot be dismissed. Contrariwise, a new global system of financial and political regulation may itself fetter the possible emergence of a stable new phase of capitalist accumulation. In any case, the future governability of the global financial and political system remains an intractable structural feature of the current crisis. Indeed, the political order has been central to my account of capitalism’s history. I have underscored the role of the state in nurturing capitalism at its beginnings, overseeing its development through mercantilism and through combined and uneven development, and then being itself transformed by revolution. Throughout I have insisted on its role in totalizing capitalist relations: generalizing, maintaining and integrating capitalist relations right through society. At the same time I have underscored the fact that capitalism internationally has developed historically through a system of rival and competitive states. I have harped on the role of the state in part because of the need to reject what has been an overly economistic understanding of capitalism. But I have also focused on the role of the state because I believe it to have been no less an essential feature of capitalism than the market and capitalist relations of production themselves, and its future role is today among the most important contradictory aspects of the current crisis. For one of the essential elements of the present situation is that the state and its territorial base continues to be essential to the continued operation of capitalism, and yet has become an obstacle to the further development of capitalism as a global system with an appropriately global means of heller maintext.indd 248 6/7/2011 11:51:02 AM conclusion 249 regulating itself. Indeed, the development of such a world-wide institutional mechanism, necessarily limiting the power of the territorial state, might well constitute a barrier to further capital accumulation. In the light of this crisis of the capitalist state, the objective of the working class should be to organize itself politically in order to advance the democratization of the political order, locally, nationally and internationally, as an alternative to capitalism. Let me conclude this discussion of the limits confronting capitalism by referring to the problem of sustaining value, the central concept of Marxist political economy. Marx observed that the accumulation of capital itself becomes a barrier to future accumulation. In the first instance, he was referring to the short-term and recurrent difficulty of maintaining profit margins on the basis of a growing mass of capital. But in a wider and longer perspective, he was pointing to the problem of the continued accumulation of surplus in the form of capital becoming a barrier to the further development of the forces of production. In order to understand why this is the case, it is important to recall that the application of scientific culture to economic life was of great importance to Marx’s understanding of capitalism, and more importantly, its eventual transformation into socialism. According to Marx’s Capital, the introduction of machinery into production in the Industrial Revolution, rather than lightening labour, had the effect of enlarging the pool of proletarians, increasing the workday, intensifying the character of work, and enslaving the worker to the machine.3 Under capitalist conditions the quest for surplus value increases the exploitation of workers while deskilling them. On the other hand, writing in the Grundrisse, Marx argued that beyond a certain point the colossal development of capitalist industry undermines value or abstract labour as a measure of social wealth. He contrasts value – a form of wealth bound to the expenditure of human labour-time – with the gigantic wealth-producing potential of modern science and technology. Value, which is intrinsic to the initial period of industrialization, becomes increasingly anachronistic in terms of the potential of the mature system of production to which it gives rise: but to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is itself … out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their heller maintext.indd 249 6/7/2011 11:51:02 AM 256 notes 97 Byres (1996). 98 Byres (2006), p. 27. 99 Callinicos, Making History (2004). 100 Ernesto Laclau, ‘Feudalism and capitalism in Latin America’ (1971). 101 Jairus Banaji, ‘Modes of production in a materialist conception of history’ (1977). 2 exPerIments In caPItalIsm: Italy, germany, france 1 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 35), p. 723. 2 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 707. See Henry Kamen, The Iron Century (1971), pp. 386–403; Catharina Lis, Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Europe (1979), pp. 71–82. 3 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 35), p. 707. 4 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 35), p. 739. 5 Anderson, Spectrum (2005), p. 251. 6 Krantz and Hohenberg (1975). 7 Giuliano Procacci, ‘Italy: commentary’ (1975), pp. 27–8. 8 Maurice Aymard, ‘From feudalism to capitalism in Italy’ (1982). 9 Maurice Aymard (ed.), Lire Braudel (1988). 10 Emilio Sereni, History of the Italian Agricultural Landscape (1997), p. 143. 11 Renato Zangheri, ‘Agricoltura e sviluppo del capitalismo’ (1968). 12 Aymard (1982), pp. 163–4, 186, 13 Aymard (1982), p. 167. 14 Ruggerio Romano, ‘La Storia Economica dal secolo XIV al Settecento’ (1972–76). 15 Renato Zangheri, ‘I rapporti storici tra progresso agricolo e svillupo economico in Italia’ (1979). 16 Wallerstein (1974), pp. 216–21. 17 Aymard (1982), pp. 185–96. 18 Sereni (1977), pp. 158, 187; Faruk Tabak, The Waning of the Mediterranean, 1550–1870 (2008), p. 192. 19 Fernand Braudel, ‘L’Italia Fuori d’Italia’ (1972–6), p. 2114. 20 Anderson (1974a), p. 192. 21 Anderson (1974b), pp. 152, 156. 22 Anderson (1974a), p.162 23 Herman van de Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market and the European Economy (Fourteenth–Sixteenth Centuries) (1963). 24 On the role of silver in the expansion of the world economy see Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty (2007), pp. 224–5. 25 Engels, The Peasant War in Germany (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 10), pp. 397–482. For appreciations of Engels’s work from a Marxist point of view see the remarks of Ernst Engelber and Günter Vogler, ‘The Peasant War in Germany – 125 years later’ (1976). 26 Engels, Peasant War, p. 399. 27 Engels, Peasant War, p. 401. heller maintext.indd 256 6/7/2011 11:51:02 AM notes 257 28 Engels, Peasant War, p. 402. 29 Engels, Peasant War, pp. 406–7. 30 Engels, Peasant War, p. 411. 31 Engels, Peasant War, pp. 412–13. 32 Engels, Peasant War, pp. 413–14. 33 Engels, Peasant War, p. 415. 34 Engels, Peasant War, pp. 415–16. 35 Engels, Peasant War, pp. 421–2. 36 Engels, Peasant War, p. 443. 37 Engels, Peasant War, p. 461. 38 Engels, Peasant War, p. 410. 39 Cited in Engelber (1976), pp. 105–6. 40 Adolf Laube, Max Steinmetz and Günter Vogler, Illustrierte Geschichte der deutschen frühbürgerlichen Revolution (1974). 41 Laube et al. (1974), pp. 9, 16–17. 42 Laube et al. (1974), pp. 14–15. 43 Laube et al. (1974), pp. 18–22. See also Tom Scott, Society and Economy in Germany 1300–1600 (2003), pp. 90–112; Wieland Held, Zwischen Marktplatz und Anger (1988), pp. 143, 160, 173, 178–80, 182; Günter Vogler, ‘Thüringens Wirtschaft und Sozialstruktur zur Bauernkriegszeit’ (2008), pp. 63–4. 44 Laube et al. (1974), pp. 51, 53. 45 Laube et al. (1974), pp. 68, 70–2, 87–9, 91, 96–102, 104. 46 Laube et al. (1974), p. 102. 47 Laube et al. (1974), p. 206. 48 Laube et al. (1974), p. 233. 49 Laube et al. (1974), pp. 192–3, 290. 50 Marcel van der Linden, ‘Marx and Engels, Dutch Marxism and the “model capitalist nation of the seventeenth century”’ (1997). 51 See, for example, Abraham Friesen, Reformation and Utopia (1974) and Andreas Dorpalen, German History in Marxist Perspective (1985), pp. 99–112. 52 Peter Blickle, Die Revolution von 1525 (2004). 53 Tom Scott, ‘The German Peasants’ War and the “crisis of feudalism”’ (2002). 54 Scott (2002). 55 Scott (2003), pp. 90–152. 56 Scott (2002), p. 292. 57 Scott (2002), pp. 254–85. 58 Scott (2002), p. 289. 59 Scott (2003), p. 5. 60 Scott (2002), p. 289. 61 Anderson (1974b), pp. 15–17. 62 Anderson (1974b), p. 40. 63 Brenner (1976), p. 61. 64 Brenner, ‘The Low Countries in the transition to capitalism’ (2001). 65 Michel Vovelle, ‘Reflections on the revisionist interpretation of the French Revolution’ (1990), pp. 749–55. heller maintext.indd 257 6/7/2011 11:51:02 AM 258 notes 66 George Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution (1987). 67 Comninel (1987), pp. 190–1, 200. 68 Wood, The Origins of Capitalism: A Longer View (2002), pp. 50–63. 69 Heller, ‘The longue duréee of the French bourgeoisie’ (2009). 70 Heller, Iron and Blood (1991), pp. 60–1. 71 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans (1989), pp. 108, 122, 127–8, 339–70; Heller (1991), pp. 60–3, 86–101, 111–15, 120–3, JeanMarie Constant, La Ligue (1996), pp. 259–312. 72 Heller (1991), pp. 142–8. 73 Heller, Labour, Science and Technology in France 1500–1620 (1996), pp. 28–32; Jean-Marc Moriceau, Les fermiers de l’Ile-de-France (1994), pp. 145–341, and ‘Le laboureur et ses enfants’ (1993). 74 Heller (1996), pp. 65–84. 75 Heller (2009), p. 51; Moriceau (1994), pp. 611–23, 631–42. 3 englIsh caPItalIsm 1 Maurice Dobb Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946), pp. 19–20. 2 Sweezy, ‘A critique’, in Rodney Howard Hilton (ed.), The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (1976a), pp. 51–2. 3 Dobb, ‘A reply’, in Hilton (1976a), pp. 62–3. 4 Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974b), p. 122. 5 Dobb (1946), p. 18. 6 Dobb (1946), pp. 237–8. 7 Dobb (1946), pp. 242, 244, 253. 8 Dobb (1946), p. 196. 9 Dobb (1946), p. 178. 10 Dobb (1946), pp. 185–6. 11 Dobb (1946), pp. 222–3. 12 Dobb (1946), pp. 223–8. 13 Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, pp. 332–3. 14 Dobb (1946), pp. 161–2, 164, 170–2. 15 Dobb (1946), pp. 125–6. 16 Sweezy, ‘A critique’, in Hilton (1976a), pp. 52–4. 17 Dobb (1946), p. 172. 18 Henry Heller, ‘The transition debate in historical perspective’ (1985). 19 Dobb (1946), pp. 157, 160. 20 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (1974). 21 Wallerstein, World Systems Analysis: An Introduction (2004), p. 14. 22 Wallerstein (1974), pp. 24, 51. 23 Wallerstein (1974), pp. 37–8, 77, 127. 24 Wallerstein (1974), Vol. 1, pp. 127, 165–221, and ‘The rise and future demise of the world capitalist system: concepts for comparative analysis’ (1979), pp. 5–6. 25 Wallerstein (1974), p. 68. 26 Wallerstein (1974), pp. 86–7, 95, 103, 104–7, 112, 116. heller maintext.indd 258 6/7/2011 11:51:02 AM notes 259 27 Wallerstein (1974), p. 127. 28 Wallerstein (1974), p. 122. 29 Wallerstein (1974), pp. 308–12, 355. 30 Wallerstein (1974), pp. 119, 124, 162, 237, 256. 31 Wallerstein (1974), pp. 95–6, 100. 32 Wallerstein (1974), p. 350. 33 Wallerstein (1974), p. 350. 34 Wallerstein (1974), p. 350. 35 Wallerstein (1974), p. 350. 36 Robert C. Allen, ‘Economic structure and agricultural productivity in Europe, 1300–1800’ (2000). 37 Robert Brenner, ‘The origins of capitalist development’ (1977), p. 72. 37 Brenner (1977), p. 72. 38 Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution (2008), pp. 82–3. 39 De Vries (2008), pp. 85–6. 40 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 35), pp. 395–6. 41 Brenner (1977), p. 92. 42 James Morris Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World (1993), p. 189. 43 Brenner, ‘Bourgeois revolution and transition to capitalism’ (1989), pp. 271–305. 44 Brenner (1989), pp. 273, 293–4, 302–3. 45 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 35), p. 739. 46 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 35), pp. 740–1. See Javier Cuenca-Estaban, ‘India’s Contribution to the British balance of payments, 1757–1812’ (2007); Irfan Habib, ‘Introduction: Marx’s perception of India’ (2006), p. xli; Utsa Patniak, ‘The free lunch’ (2006), pp. 36–9. 47 Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (2003), p. 434. 48 Massimo de Angelis, ‘Marx and primitive accumulation’ (2001). 49 David Harvey, The New Imperialism (2003), pp. 142–52. 50 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 35), p. 707, cited in Brenner (1989), p. 293. 51 Brenner (1989), p. 294. 52 James Galloway, ‘One market or many?’ (2000), pp. 23–42; J. A. Chartres, ‘Market integration and agricultural output in seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth century England’ (1995), p. 27; Robert Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (2009), pp. 588–9. 53 C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700, Vol. 1 (1984), pp. 78–9, 80, 83–5, 302–5. 54 Dobb (1946), pp. 114–22. 55 Gregory Clark, ‘Land rental values and the agrarian economy in England and Wales: 1500–1914’ (2002). 56 Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities (2000), pp. 72–5, 133–5, 136–7, 183–90. 57 Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England (1996), p. 44. 58 Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor (1991), pp. 60, 63–5; heller maintext.indd 259 6/7/2011 11:51:02 AM 260 notes Peter Clark, ‘Migration in England during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’ (1987), pp. 236–42. 59 W. E. Minchinton (ed.), Wage Regulation in Pre-Industrial England (1972), p. 22; Christopher Frank, Master and Servant Law (2010), pp. 4–5; Marc Steinberg, ‘Capitalist development, labour process and the law’ (2003), p. 456. 60 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 770. 61 István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (1995), pp. 110–33. 62 Jane Whittle, The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk 1440–1580 (2000). 63 Whittle (2000), pp. 307–8. 64 Overton (1996), p. 205. 65 Robert C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (1992), pp. 14–15, 18–19, 21, 208. 66 H. J. Habakkuk, ‘Economic functions of English landowners in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ (1968). 67 P. K. O’Brien and D. Heath, ‘English and French landowners 1688–1789’ (1994), p. 43. 68 Ellen Meiskins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (1999). 69 E. M. Wood (1999), pp. 137–9. 70 E. M. Wood (1999), pp. 130–1. 71 Gregory King, Two Tracts: (a) Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the State and Condition of England; (b) Of the Naval Trade of England and the National Profit then Arising Thereby (1936). 72 De Vries (2008), p. 82. For a European-wide survey of the place of wage and other forms of labour see Jan Lucassen, ‘Mobilization of Labour in Early Modern Europe’ (2001). 73 E. M. Wood (1999), pp. 52–3, 58–60. 74 E. M. Wood (1999), pp. 21–6. 75 Bob Kiernan, Blood and Soil (2007), pp. 169–212; Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1 (1994), pp. 44–6, 48–9. 76 E. M. Wood (1999), pp. 110–15, 152–65. 77 Ronald L. Meek, Studies in the Labor Theory of Value (1975), pp. 20–1; Neal Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (1984), p. 37. 78 Joachim Bischoff and Christoph Lieber, ‘The concept of value in modern economy (2008), p. 36. 79 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 35), p. 70. 4 bourgeoIs revolutIon 1 Brenner conveniently recapitulates Marx’s theory of transition to capitalism in ‘Bourgeois revolution’ (1989), pp. 278–9. 2 Marcel van der Linden, ‘Marx and Engels, Dutch Marxism’ (1997), p. 163. 3 Jonathan Irvine Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (1989), pp. 10, 25, 27; Jan de Vries, The First Modern Economy (1997), pp. 198–210, 279–83. heller maintext.indd 260 6/7/2011 11:51:02 AM notes 261 4 Van der Linden (1997), pp. 168–70. 5 Van der Linden (1997), pp. 177–8. 6 For a recent updating see Pepijn Brandon, ‘The Dutch revolt’ (2007). 7 Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (1994), pp. 44–7, 155–7. 8 Marx, Capital, Vol. 3 (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 37), pp. 326–7. 9 Marx, Capital, Vol. 3 (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 37), pp. 329–30. 10 Hobsbawm, ‘The crisis of the seventeenth century’ (1965), pp. 5–58. 11 Hobsbawm’s view as well as that of others can be found in Aston (1965). See also Jonathan Dewald, Geoffey Parker et al., ‘AHR Forum’ (2008). 12 Hobsbawm (1965), p. 42. 13 Hobsbawm (1965), p. 42. 14 Ellen Meiskins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (1999), pp. 87–90. 15 Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648 (2003), p. 136. 16 Teschke (2003), p. 207. 17 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 35), pp. 742–4. 18 Jan Lucassen, ‘Labour and early modern economic development’ (1995). 19 Marx, Capital, Vol. 3(Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 37), p. 597. 20 Karel Davids, ‘Shifts of technological leadership in early modern Europe’ (1995), pp. 347–8. 21 Brenner, ‘The Low Countries in the transition to capitalism’ (2001). 22 Brenner (2001), p. 311. 23 Wood, ‘The question of market dependence’ (2002b). 24 Wood (2002b). 25 Marjolein ‘T Hart, Pepijn Brandon and Thomas Goosens, ‘The commer-Pepijn Brandon and Thomas Goosens, ‘The commer-Brandon and Thomas Goosens, ‘The commercialization of warfare as a strategy for hegemonial powers’ (2008). 26 George Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution (1987). 27 Paul Blackledge, ‘Political Marxism’ (2008). 28 Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 11), pp. 103–4. 29 English and French revisionism is critically reviewed in Brian Manning, ‘The English Revolution’ (1999) and Michel Vovelle, ‘Reflections on the revisionist interpretation of the French Revolution’ (1990). 30 Benno Teschke, ‘Bourgeois revolution, state formation and the absence of the international’ (2005), p. 11. 31 Teschke (2005), p. 12. 32 Ellen Meiskins Wood and John Bellamy Foster (eds), In Defense of History (1997). 33 Brenner (1989), pp. 278–9. 34 Brenner (1989), p. 286. 35 Brenner (1989), pp. 293–4. 36 Brenner (1989), p. 295. 37 Hill’s views were sharpened by his participation in the debates of the British Communist historians group. See now David Parker, Ideology, Absolutism and the English Revolution (2009), p. 9. 38 Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (1965). heller maintext.indd 261 6/7/2011 11:51:02 AM 262 notes 39 Brenner (1989), pp. 297–8. 40 Brenner (1989), p. 302. 41 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (1993), pp. 647–8. 42 Brenner (1993), pp. 651–8. 43 Anderson, ‘Robert Brenner’ (2005), p, 250. On the difficulties involved in defining the nature of the English monarchy see Parker (2009), pp. 34–5, 40–5. 44 E. M. Wood (1999), p. 20. 45 Lawrence Stone, ‘The bourgeois revolution in seventeenth-century England revisited’ (1985). 46 Norah Carlin, The Causes of the English Civil War (1999), pp. 157–8. 47 John Merrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (1993), p. 163. 48 Andrew Bell Appleby, ‘Agrarian capitalism or seigneurial reaction’ (1975). 49 Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts (1988), p. 36. 50 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 35), pp. 731–2. 51 Marx, Capital, Vol. 3 (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 37), p. 786. 52 Dobb (1946), pp. 125–6. 53 An appreciation of his approach and a complete bibliography can be found in Paul Blackledge, ‘Editorial introduction: Brian Manning, 21 May 1927–24 April 2004, historian of the people and the English Revolution’ (2003). 54 This account is largely drawn from Manning (1991), Aristocrats, Plebians and Revolution in England 1640–1660 (1996), and Revolution and Counter-Revolution in England, Ireland and Scotland 1658–60 (2003). 55 Andrew Hopper, ‘Black Tom’ (2007), pp. 33–53, 130–51; John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (1999), pp. 278–9; I. J. Gentles, The English Revolution and the War in the Three Kingdoms, 1638–1652 (2007), p. 130. 56 Tony Smith, Globalisation (2006), pp. 232–3. 57 Christopher Hill, ‘A bourgeois revolution?’ (1980), pp. 134–5. 58 Manning (1991), p. 139. 59 Alex Callinicos, ‘Bourgeois revolutions and historical materialism’ (1989). 60 See above pp. 71–2. 61 Comninel (1987), p. 200. 62 Comninel (1987), pp. 190–1. 63 E. M. Wood (1999), pp. 56, 111, 119–21. 64 Henry Heller, ‘The longue durée of the French bourgeoisie’ (2009). 65 Anatoli Ado, Paysans en révolution (1996), p. 51. 66 Jean-Marc Moriceau, Les fermiers de l’Ile-de-France (1994a), pp. 703–69; ‘Les gros fermiers en 1789: vice-rois de la plain de France’ (1989), pp. 46–7. 67 Ado (1996), p. 53. 68 Jean-Marc Moriceau, ‘Au rendez-vous de la “revolution agricole” dans la France du XVIIIe siècle: à propos des regions de grande culture’ (1994b). 69 Henry Heller, The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789–1815 (2006), pp. 27–41. heller maintext.indd 262 6/7/2011 11:51:02 AM notes 263 70 John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue (2006), p. 2. 71 Heller (2006), pp. 4–5, 48; Christian Gehrke and Heinz D. Kurz, ‘Marx on physiocracy’ (1995). 72 Giani Vaggi, ‘The role of profits in physiocratic economics’ (1985). 73 Nicolaus Baudeau, Première introduction à la philosophie économique, ou analyse des états policés (1767/1910), pp. 41–67. 74 Claude Morilhat, La prise de conscience du capitalisme (1988), pp. 157–8. 75 Morilhat, (1988), pp. 158–9, 164, 168–9, 171. 76 Morilhat (1988), pp. 156, 173–4. 77 Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Riches (1898), p. 24. 78 Morilhat (1988), pp. 167–8. 79 Jean-Joseph-Louis Graslin, Essai analytique sur la richesse et sur l’impôt (1767/1911), pp. 59–60; Marcel Dorigny, ‘La formation de la pensée économiques de Sieyès d’après ses manuscrits (1770–1789)’ (1988). 80 Comninel (1987), p.190. 81 J. M. Nesson, Commoners, Common Right, Enclosures and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (1993), pp. 297–330. 82 See Kenneth E. Carpenter, The Dissemination of the Wealth of Nations in French and in France 1776–1843 (2002), pp. xxii–xxiii, xxix, xlii; Richard Whatmore, ‘Adam Smith’s role in the French Revolution’ (2002). 83 Whatmore (2002); Dorigny, ‘Les courants du libéralisme français à la fin de l’Ancien Régime et aux débuts de la Révolution’ (1989), p. 26. 84 Heller (2006), pp. 54–60. 85 Peter McPhee, ‘Revolution or Jacquerie?’ (2008), pp. 46–67. 86 Samuel Guicheteau, Révolution des ouvriers nantais (2008). 5 PolItIcal caPItalIsm 1 Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966). 2 Peter D. Thomas, The Gramscian Moment (2009), pp. 75–6, 148–50. 3 Terence J. Byres, Capitalism from Above and Capitalism from Below (1996), p. 20. 4 Engels, The Peasant Question in France and Germany (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 27), p. 500. 5 Byres (1996), pp. 22–3, Jairus Banaji, ‘Illusions about the peasantry’ (1990). 6 V. I. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1964a), pp. 32–3. 7 Lenin, The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905–1907 (1964b), p. 347. 8 Lenin (1964b), p. 238. 9 Lenin (1964b), p. 423. 10 Kevin B. Anderson, ‘The rediscovery and persistence of the dialectic in philosophy and world politics’ (2007), p. 131. heller maintext.indd 263 6/7/2011 11:51:02 AM 264 notes 11 Byres (1996). 12 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 35), p. 739. 13 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 35), p. 741. 14 Quoted in Byres (1996), p. 31. 15 Byres (1996), pp. 31–2. 16 Byres (1996), p. 28. 17 Byres (1996), pp. 27–9. 18 Byres (1996), p. 151. 19 Byres (1996), pp. 393–406. 20 Byres (1996), p. 397. 21 Susan A. Mann and James A. Dickinson, ‘State and agriculture in two eras of American capitalism’ (1980). 22 Byres (1996), p. 419. 23 Byres (1996), p. 421. 24 Byres (1996), pp. 422, 425–6. 25 Byres (1996), p. 432. 26 Byres, ‘The agrarian question, forms of capitalist agrarian transition and the state’ (1986), ‘The agrarian question and differing forms of capitalist agrarian transition’ (1991). 27 Neil Davidson, ‘The Scottish path to capitalist agriculture 1’ (2004b), pp. 232–5. 28 Davidson (2004b), pp. 246–8. 29 Davidson, Discovering the Scottish Revolution 1792–1746 (2003), pp. 94–101. 30 Davidson (2004b), pp. 253–4. 31 Davidson, ‘The Scottish path to capitalist agriculture 2’ (2004c), pp. 417–18. 32 Davidson, The Origins of Scottish Nationhood (2000), p. 182. 33 Davidson (2000), p.168. 34 Davidson (2000), p.168. 35 Davidson, ‘Putting the nation back into “the international”’ (2009). 36 Davidson (2000), p.168. 37 Davidson (2000), p.168. 38 Leon Trotsky, ‘For the internationalist perspective’ (1972), p. 199, quoted in Davidson (2009), p. 15. 39 Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (1961), pp. 4–5. 40 Davidson (2000), pp. 168–9. 41 Trotsky (1961), p. 6. 42 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Scottish reformers of the eighteenth century and capitalist agriculture’ (1980), p. 5. 43 Davidson, ‘The Scottish path to capitalist agriculture 3’ (2005b), pp. 22–3. 44 Davidson (2005b), p. 53. 45 Davidson (2005b), p. 23. 46 Quoted in Byres (1986), p. 42. 47 Byres (1986), pp. 42–3. 48 Byres (1986), pp. 49–50. 49 Wolf Ladejinsky, ‘Agrarian revolution in Japan’ (1959); Teruoka Shuzo, heller maintext.indd 264 6/7/2011 11:51:02 AM notes 265 ‘Land reform and postwar Japanese capitalism’ (1989); Shigeto Tsuru, Japan’s Capitalism (1993), pp. 20–2. 50 Byres (1986), pp. 58–9. 51 Byres (1986), p. 60. For further discussion of the development of capitalism in under-developed states see Henry Bernstein, ‘Agrarian classes in capitalist development’ (1994). 52 Amiya Kumar Bagchi, ‘The past and future of the developmental state’ (2000). 53 John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The imperialism of free trade (1953). 54 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1937), p. 391. 55 William Petty, Political Arithmetik (1899/1963), Vol. 1, p. 295. 56 Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism (2000), pp. 127–8. 57 Eli F. Heckscher, Mercantilism (1935); Jacob Viner, Studies in the Theory of International Trade (1937). 58 John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), pp. 333–71. See also Elize S. Brezis, ‘Mercantilism’ (2003), Vol. 3, pp. 481–5. 59 Ronald Findlay, and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty (2007), pp. 228–9. 60 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 35), p. 739. 61 Perelman (2000), p. 218. 62 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 35), p. 745. 63 Marx, Capital, Vol. 3 (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 37), p. 335. 64 Marx, Capital, Vol. 3 (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 37), p. 335. 65 Marx, Capital, Vol. 3 (Marx and Engels, 1975–, Vol. 37), p. 771. 66 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 328. 67 Dobb (1946), p. 199. As Richard Grassby, ‘English merchant capitalism’ (1970), pp. 95, 100, 105–6 has suggested, the best profits were to be found in speculation and overseas trade. 68 Dobb (1946), pp. 199–200. 69 Dobb (1946), pp. 202, 204–5. 70 Dobb (1946), p. 209. 71 Dobb (1946), pp. 213–14. 72 Dobb (1946), pp. 206, 217–19. 73 Dobb (1946), p. 219. 74 Anderson (1974b), pp. 35–9. 75 Arrighi (1994), pp. 49–51. 76 Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648 (2003), p. 208. 77 Teschke (2003), pp. 204–7. 78 David Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires (2003); François Crouzet, ‘Mercantilism, war and the rise of British power’ (2002); Kenneth Morgan, ‘Mercantilism and the British Empire’ (2002). 79 Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (1997), p. 515. 80 Philippe Minard, La fortune du colbertisme (1998). 81 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 742. 82 Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins (2010), pp. 9–11, 17–20, 22–3, 31–33. heller maintext.indd 265 6/7/2011 11:51:03 AM 272 notes 36 Ricardo Duchesne, ‘Between sinocentrism and Eurocentrism’ (2001–02). I am indebted to Professor Duchesne’s summary of Frank’s work. 37 Duchesne (2001–02). 38 Patrick K. O’Brien, ‘The foundations of European industrialization’ (1991). 39 Patrick K. O’Brien, ‘Imperialism and the rise and decline of the British economy, 1688–1999’ (1999). 40 Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (2009b), pp. 25–56. 41 Duchesne (2001–2), p. 444. 42 Duchesne (2001–2), p. 453. 43 Pomeranz (2000). 44 Pomeranz (2000), pp. 14–15. 45 Robert Brenner and Christopher Isett, ‘England’s divergence from China’s Yangzi delta’ (2002). I am indebted to Brenner and Isett for their summation of Pomeranz’s views. 46 Robert C. Allen, ‘Agricultural productivity and rural incomes in England and the Yangtze delta, c. 1620–1820’ (2009a). 47 Robert C. Allen, Farm to Factory (2003). 48 Robert C. 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