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Introduction

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Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism

Part of the book series: Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ((MAENMA))

Abstract

This introduction presents the “political Marxist” or “Capital-centric” theoretical framework that informs the chapters in this book in addition to offering an overview of Marxist debates on the origins of capitalism. We begin with a discussion of classical accounts of the emergence of capitalism and of the evolution of Marx’s thought on this issue. When then move to the first major Marxist debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, which opposed Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezy. This volume builds on Robert Brenner’s path-breaking contribution on the transition of capitalism. The introduction summarizes this contribution as well as Brenner’s critique of Immanuel Wallerstein’s work, in addition to discussing some of the main critiques to which Brenner’s work has been exposed. We also present the codification of “political Marxism” developed by Ellen Meiksins Wood and end with a summary of the different chapters in this book.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Among many recent contributions, see, for instance, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (London: Verso, 2012); Frederic L. Pryor, Capitalism reassessed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Anwar Shaikh, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

  2. 2.

    David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, and the Crises of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); David McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance (Halifax: Fernwood, 2011); Paul Mason, Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed (New York and London: Verso, 2010); Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time. The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (New York and London: Verso, 2014).

  3. 3.

    John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011); Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (London: Penguin Books, 2014); Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (New York and London: Verso, 2016); The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (New York and London: Verso, 2018); Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life (New York and London: Verso, 2015).

  4. 4.

    Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2014).

  5. 5.

    Joyce Oldham Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2010); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Henry Heller, The Birth of Capitalism: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective (Halifax: Fernwood, 2011); Jürgen Kocka, Capitalism: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Jürgen Kocka and Marcel van der Linden, Capitalism: The Reemergence of a Historical Concept (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Larry Neal and Jeffrey G. Williamson, The Cambridge History of Capitalism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014).

  6. 6.

    See, for instance, Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); “Toward a Political Economy of Slave Labor: Hands, Whipping-Machines, and Modern Power,” in Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, ed. Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Svan Beckert and Christine Desan, American Capitalism: New Histories (New York, Columbia University Press, 2018); Joshua Clark Davis, From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); Louis Hyman, Debtor Nation: The History of America Red Ink (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Steven H. Jaffe and Jessica Lautin, Capital of Capital: Money, Banking, and Power in New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Julia C. Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2014); Joshua D. Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). For a critique of the “new history of capitalism” and of its analysis of slavery, see Charles Post, “Slavery and the New History of Capitalism,” Catalyst 1, no. 1 (2017): 173–192.

  7. 7.

    Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso Books, 2002), 11–12, 28.

  8. 8.

    Larry Neal, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge History of Capitalism, ed. Larry Neal and Jeffrey G. Williamson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 2.

  9. 9.

    Ibid., 6.

  10. 10.

    Kocka, Capitalism, viii.

  11. 11.

    Ibid., 23–24.

  12. 12.

    Heller, The Birth of Capitalism, 9–11.

  13. 13.

    Ibid., 10.

  14. 14.

    Appleby, The Relentless Revolution, 21.

  15. 15.

    Ibid., 12. Brenner and Wood have also often insisted that mature trade networks were a necessity but an insufficient condition for a capitalist transition. See, for instance, Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 175.

  16. 16.

    Appleby, The Relentless Revolution, 12.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., 10–11, 21, 26.

  18. 18.

    Presenting capitalism as a “cultural system” and getting her theoretical inspiration from Weber’s work, Appleby (The Relentless Revolution, 3, 7, 17) approaches the issue by focusing on the evolution of “values, habits, and modes of reasoning”. According to her, breakthroughs paving the way to a capitalist society were due to “inventors” and “determined and disciplined pathbreakers” that showed sufficient will to “get out of the straightjacket of custom” and “to resist the siren call to return to the habitual order of things”. Here, Appleby seems to fall back into a narrative focused on the elimination of obstacles.

  19. 19.

    The phrases “political Marxism” and “Capital-centric Marxism” are used interchangeably throughout this volume.

  20. 20.

    Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Bantham, 2003). For a summary of Smith’s account, see Robert Brenner, “Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism,” in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, ed. A.L. Beier, David Cannadine and James M. Rosenheim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1989), 280–281; Robert J. Holton, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (Houndmills, Macmillan, 1985), 35.

  21. 21.

    Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 350.

  22. 22.

    Max Weber, General Economic History (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1981), 275–278.

  23. 23.

    Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Los Angeles: Roxbury, 2002).

  24. 24.

    Ira J. Cohen, “Max Weber on Modern Western Capitalism,” in General Economic History, by Max Weber (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1981), XXV–XXVI; Holton, The Transition, 126–127.

  25. 25.

    Cohen, “Max Weber,” XLI–XLII; Randall Collins, “Weber’s Last Theory of Capitalism: a Systematization,” American Sociological Review 45, no. 6 (1981), 933.

  26. 26.

    Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 158–163.

  27. 27.

    Collins, “Weber’s Last Theory of Capitalism,” 930; Wood, Democracy against Capitalism, 172–173.

  28. 28.

    Stephen Kalberg, “Introduction,” in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by Max Weber (Los Angeles: Roxbury, 2002), LXI. See also Wood, Democracy against Capitalism, 172–173.

  29. 29.

    Max Weber, “The Separation of the Worker from the Means of Production, the Spread of Officialdom, and Organizational Discipline in the Factory,” in Max Weber: Readings and Commentary on Modernity, ed. Stephen Kalberg (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 136; Holton, The Transition, 139–140; Wood, Democracy against Capitalism, 164–165.

  30. 30.

    Weber, “The Separation of the Worker,” 131.

  31. 31.

    For a detailed summary of Marx’s first narrative of the emergence of capitalism, see Brenner, “Bourgeois Revolution,” 276–278.

  32. 32.

    For discussions of this evolution of Marx’s thought, see Brenner, “Bourgeois Revolution”, and Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 35–37.

  33. 33.

    Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 506.

  34. 34.

    Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 3 (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 730–732.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., 444.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., 444–445.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., 449–450.

  38. 38.

    Ibid., 926.

  39. 39.

    Marx, Grundrisse, 493; Brenner, “Bourgeois Revolution,” 285–288.

  40. 40.

    Marx, Capital, Volume 3, 926.

  41. 41.

    Brenner, “Bourgeois Revolution,” 288–291.

  42. 42.

    Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 874; emphasis added.

  43. 43.

    Ibid., 932.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., 874–875.

  45. 45.

    Ibid., 908.

  46. 46.

    See Leon Trotsky, “Three Concepts of the Russian Revolution,” in Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and his Influence, ed. Charles Malamuth (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941); and Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), Chapters 11–14.

  47. 47.

    M.N. Pokrovsky, Brief History of Russia, Volume II (New York: International Publishers, 1933).

  48. 48.

    Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1946), in particular Chapters I–IV.

  49. 49.

    Our assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Dobb’s account of the transition is based on Robert Brenner, “Dobb on the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 2 (1978): 121–140 and Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 37–43.

  50. 50.

    Paul Sweezy, “A Critique,” in The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, ed. Rodney Hilton (London: New Left Books, 1976).

  51. 51.

    The entire debate is collected in Rodney Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1976).

  52. 52.

    Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956 [1927]).

  53. 53.

    Paul Sweezy, “A Critique” and “A Rejoinder,” in The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, ed. Rodney Hilton (London: New Left Books, 1976).

  54. 54.

    Rodney Hilton, “Comment,” in The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, ed. Rodney Hilton (London: New Left Books, 1976).

  55. 55.

    A similar conception of household producers as “capitalists in embryo” awaiting their liberation from non-market constraints can be found in Karl Kautsky, The Agrarian Question (London: Swan Books, 1988 [1899]), and V.I. Lenin, “The Development of Capitalism in Russia,” in Lenin’s Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964 [1898]).

  56. 56.

    Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965).

  57. 57.

    George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge (London: Verso, 1991), and Xavier Lafrance, “Citizens and Wage-Laborers: Capitalism and the Making of a Working Class in France” (PhD diss., York University, 2013).

  58. 58.

    Robert P. Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Our assessment of the “Brenner Debate” is shaped by Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 50–61.

  59. 59.

    Douglas North and Robert P. Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

  60. 60.

    M.M. Postan, “Medieval Agrarian Society in its Prime: England,” in Cambridge Economic History of Europe from the Decline of the Roman Empire, Volume 1, Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages, ed. M.M. Postan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1966).

  61. 61.

    Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1974).

  62. 62.

    The implications of Brenner’s argument for a Marxism that rejects notions of “necessary stages of history” marked by a necessary sequence of modes of production (primitive communism-slavery-feudalism-capitalism-socialism) are drawn out by Daniel Bensaïd, Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique (London: Verso, 2002), Part I.

  63. 63.

    Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “A Reply to Robert Brenner,” in The Brenner Debate, ed. T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

  64. 64.

    Guy Bois, “Against the Neo-Malthussian Orthodoxy,” in The Brenner Debate.

  65. 65.

    Rodney Hilton, “A Crisis of Feudalism,” in The Brenner Debate.

  66. 66.

    Robert P. Brenner, “Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” in The Brenner Debate, 246–253.

  67. 67.

    Ibid., 242–253.

  68. 68.

    Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 55.

  69. 69.

    Heidi Gerstenberger, “The Bourgeois State Form Revisited,” in Open Marxism, Volume I: Dialectics and History, ed. Werner Bonefeld et al. (London: Pluto Press, 1992) and Impersonal Power: History and Theory of the Bourgeois State (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009).

  70. 70.

    For a defense of this notion, see Charles Post, “Capital-Centric Marxism’ and the Capitalist State,” Verso Books Blog, 2015, http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2345-charles-post-the-separation-of-the-economic-and-the-political-under-capitalism-capital-centric-marxism-and-the-capitalist-state.

  71. 71.

    Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Volume I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974).

  72. 72.

    W.W. Rostow, Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1960).

  73. 73.

    Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), 9.

  74. 74.

    Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).

  75. 75.

    Robert P. Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalism: A Critique of Neo–Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review I, no. 104 (1977): 27–92.

  76. 76.

    Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937 [1776]), Book I.

  77. 77.

    John Hatcher and Mark Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages: The History and Theory of England’s Economic Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

  78. 78.

    S.H. Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status and Gender (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1995).

  79. 79.

    Spencer Dimmock, The Origin of Capitalism in England, 1400–1600 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 34–48.

  80. 80.

    S.R. Epstein, Freedom and Growth: The Rise of States and Markets in Europe, 1300–1750 (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).

  81. 81.

    H.R. French and R.W. Hoyle, The Character of English Rural Society: Earls Colne, 1550–1750 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007).

  82. 82.

    Jane Whittle, The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labor in Norfolk, 1440–1580 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 305–313.

  83. 83.

    Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 6–8.

  84. 84.

    Dimmock, The Origin of Capitalism in England, 2014, 118–120.

  85. 85.

    For a discussion and critique of the “canonical” version of historical materialism, see Vivek Chibber, “What is Living and What is Dead in the Marxist Theory of History?” Historical Materialism 19, no. 2 (2011): 60–91. An important essay by Arthur Prinz (“Background and Ulterior Motive of Marx’s Preface of 1859,” Journal of the History of Ideas 30, (1969): 437–450) raises serious questions about the scientific status of the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy—the key text cited by those who argue that Marx believed that the transhistorical development of the productive forces was the driving force of historical development. After carefully reviewing the strictures Prussian and other German state censors placed on the publication of critical and radical materials, Prinz concludes that key passages of the 1859 Preface may have been written to elude censorship rather than to elaborate Marx’s concept of history.

  86. 86.

    Chris Harman (“From Feudalism to Capitalism,” International Socialism Journal 2, no. 45 (1989): 35–87; “The Rise of Capitalism,” International Socialism Journal 2, no. 102 (2004); “The Origins of Capitalism,” International Socialism Journal 2, no. 111 (2006)) and Alex Callinicos (Making History: Agency, Structure and Change in Social Theory (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009 [1987])) initially rejected historical arguments based on the “primacy of the productive forces” but embraced it in Alex Callinicos, Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

  87. 87.

    Harman, “From Feudalism to Capitalism.”

  88. 88.

    Harman, “The Rise of Capitalism” and “The Origins of Capitalism.”

  89. 89.

    Robert P. Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalism,” International Socialism Journal 2, no. 102 (2006).

  90. 90.

    Harman and other “productive forces” Marxists claim that Brenner argues that all forms of social labor before capitalism experienced technological stagnation. This is a caricature of Brenner’s position. Brenner and other “political Marxists” have consistently argued that the development of the productivity of labor through new tools and methods is highly episodic before capitalism and often has a “once and for all” character because of the ability of pre-capitalist dominant and producing classes to reproduce themselves without successful market competition. Only under capitalism do we see the systematic development of the forces of production under the “whip” of market competition—the operation of the law of value.

  91. 91.

    Chibber (“What is Living”) makes this point.

  92. 92.

    Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalism.”

  93. 93.

    Alex Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu, How The West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2015).

  94. 94.

    Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (London: Victor Gallancz, 1932), Chapter 1.

  95. 95.

    Our criticisms of Anievas and Nisancioglu are based upon Spencer Dimmock, “The Eastern Origins of Capitalism?” Historical Materialism Blog, 2016, http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/eastern-origins-capitalism; Sebastian Rioux, “Mind the (Theoretical) Gap: On the Poverty of International Relations Theorising of Uneven and Combined Development,” Global Society 29, no. 4 (2015); and Charles Post, “The Use and Misuse of Uneven and Combined Development: A Critique of Aneivas and Niscancioglu, How The West Came To Rule: The Geopolitical Origins Of Capitalism,” Historical Materialism (forthcoming).

  96. 96.

    Sam Ashman (“Capitalism, Uneven and Combined Development and the Transhistoric,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 22, no. 1 (2009): 29–46) makes this point in her critique of earlier attempts to universalize the “law of uneven and combined development”.

  97. 97.

    Wood, Democracy against Capitalism.

  98. 98.

    Ibid., 26.

  99. 99.

    Robert P. Brenner, “Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong,” in Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Chris Wickham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 58.

  100. 100.

    Anievas and Nisancioglu (How the West Came to Rule, 24) made this critique.

  101. 101.

    Wood, Democracy against Capitalism, 23–28, 49–75.

  102. 102.

    Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (London, Verso Books, 2003).

  103. 103.

    Robert P. Brenner, “The Social Basis of Economic Development,” in Analytical Marxism, ed. John Roemer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 31–32.

  104. 104.

    Wood, Democracy against Capitalism, Chapter 1.

  105. 105.

    Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: 2001, Beacon Press, 2001).

  106. 106.

    See, for instance, Anievas and Nisancioglu, How the West Came to Rule, 29–30 and “What’s at Stake in the Transition Debate? Rethinking the Origins of Capitalism and the ‘Rise of the West’,” Millennium: Journal of international Studies 42, no. 1 (2013): 78–102.

  107. 107.

    Shaikh, Capitalism, 726.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Québec in Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada

    Xavier Lafrance

  2. Graduate Center and Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

    Charles Post

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  1. University of Québec in Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada

    Xavier Lafrance

  2. Graduate Center and Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

    Charles Post

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Lafrance, X., Post, C. (2019). Introduction. In: Lafrance, X., Post, C. (eds) Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95657-2_1

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