Brenner's 'The Origins of Capitalism' Pt 1: Wallerstein - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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I thought it might be interesting to have a Marxist text to analyse piece by piece each week. Here's the first part of quite a long essay on capitalist development. Though I will post it in parts every few days, the full article is here: http://libcom.org/library/origins-capit ... rt-brenner

Robert Brenner wrote:The origins of capitalist development: a critique of neo-Smithian Marxism

The appearance of systematic barriers to economic advance in the course of capitalist expansion—the ‘development of underdevelopment’—has posed difficult problems for Marxist theory. [*] There has arisen, in response, a strong tendency sharply to revise Marx’s conceptions regarding economic development. In part, this has been a healthy reaction to the Marx of the Manifesto, who envisioned a more or less direct and inevitable process of capitalist expansion: undermining old modes of production, replacing them with capitalist social productive relations and, on this basis, setting off a process of capital accumulation and economic development more or less following the pattern of the original homelands of capitalism. In the famous phrases of the Communist Manifesto: ‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in an altered form was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty, and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. The bourgeoisie . . . draw all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls . . . It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it creates a world after its own image.’

Many writers have quite properly pointed out that historical developments since the mid-nineteenth century have tended to belie this ‘optimistic’, ‘progressist’ prognosis, in that the capitalist penetration of the ‘third world’ through trade and capital investment not only has failed to carry with it capitalist economic development, but has erected positive barriers to such development. Yet the question remains, where did Marx err? What was the theoretical basis for his incorrect expectations? As can be seen from the above quotation and many others from the same period, [1] Marx was at first quite confident that capitalist economic expansion, through trade and investment, would inevitably bring with it the transformation of pre-capitalist social-productive relations—i.e. class relations—and the establishment of capitalist social-productive relations, a capitalist class structure. It was clearly on the premise that capitalist expansion would lead to the establishment of capitalist social relations of production on the ruins of the old modes, that he could predict world-wide economic development in a capitalist image.

But, suppose capitalist expansion through trade and investment failed to break the old modes of production (a possibility which Marx later envisaged [2]); or actually tended to strengthen the old modes, or to erect other non-capitalist systems of social relations of production in place of the old modes? In this case, Marx’s prediction would fall to the ground. For whatever Marx thought about the origins of capitalist social-productive relations, he was quite clear that their establishment was indispensable for the development of the productive forces, i.e. for capitalist economic development. If expansion through trade and investment did not bring with it the transition to capitalist social-productive relations—manifested in the full emergence of labour power as a commodity—there could be no capital accumulation on an extended scale. In consequence, the analysis of capitalist economic development requires an understanding, in the first place, of the manner in which the capitalist social-productive relations underpinning the accumulation of capital on an extended scale originated. In turn, it demands a comprehension of the way in which the various processes of capitalist expansion set off by the accumulation of capital brought about, or were accompanied by, alternatively: 1. the further erection of capitalist class relations; 2. merely the interconnection of capitalist with pre-capitalist forms, and indeed the strengthening of the latter; or 3. the transformation of pre-capitalist class relations, but without their substitution by fully capitalist social-productive relations of free wage labour, in which labour power is a commodity. In every case, it is class relations which clearly become pivotal: the question of their transformation in relationship to economic development.

I. Introduction

I shall argue here that the method of an entire line of writers in the Marxist tradition has led them to displace class relations from the centre of their analyses of economic development and underdevelopment. It has been their intention to negate the optimistic model of economic advance derived from Adam Smith, whereby the development of trade and the division of labour unfailingly bring about economic development. Because they have failed, however, to discard the underlying individualistic-mechanist presuppositions of this model, they have ended up by erecting an alternative theory of capitalist development which is, in its central aspects, the mirror image of the ‘progressist’ thesis they wish to surpass. Thus, very much like those they criticize, they conceive of (changing) class relations as emerging more or less directly from the (changing) requirements for the generation of surplus and development of production, under the pressures and opportunities engendered by a growing world market. Only, whereas their opponents tend to see such market-determined processes as setting off, automatically, a dynamic of economic development, they see them as enforcing the rise of economic backwardness. As a result, they fail to take into account either the way in which class structures, once established, will in fact determine the course of economic development or underdevelopment over an entire epoch, or the way in which these class structures themselves emerge: as the outcome of class struggles whose results are incomprehensible in terms merely of market forces. In consequence, they move too quickly from the proposition that capitalism is bound up with, and supportive of, continuing underdevelopment in large parts of the world, to the conclusion not only that the rise of underdevelopment is inherent in the extension of the world division of labour through capitalist expansion, but also that the ‘development of underdevelopment’ is an indispensable condition for capitalist development itself.

FRANK AND CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT

It has thus been maintained that the very same mechanisms which set off underdevelopment in the ‘periphery’ are prerequisite to capital accumulation in the ‘core’. Capitalist development cannot take place in the core unless underdevelopment is developed in the periphery, because the very mechanisms which determine underdevelopment are required for capitalist accumulation. In the words of André Gunder Frank, ‘economic development and underdevelopment are the opposite faces of the same coin’. As Frank goes on to explain: ‘Both [development and underdevelopment] are the necessary result and contemporary manifestation of internal contradictions in the world capitalist system . . . economic development and underdevelopment are relational and qualitative, in that each is actually different from, yet caused by its relations with, the other. Yet development and underdevelopment are the same in that they are the product of a single, but dialectically contradictory, economic structure and process of capitalism. Thus they cannot be viewed as the product of supposedly different economic structures or systems . . . One and the same historical process of the expansion and development of capitalism throughout the world has simultaneously generated—and continues to generate—both economic development and structural underdevelopment.’ [3] Specifically: ‘The metropolis expropriates economic surplus from its satellites and appropriates it for its own economic development. The satellites remain underdeveloped for lack of access to their own surplus and as a consequence of the same polarization and exploitative contradictions which the metropolis introduces and maintains in the satellite’s domestic structure.’ [4]

Obviously such a view of underdevelopment carries with it a view of development, the unitary process which ostensibly brought about both. Frank’s primary focus has in fact been on the roots of underdevelopment, so it has not been essential for him to go into great detail concerning the origins and structure of capitalist development itself. Yet, to clarify his approach, it was necessary to lay out the mainsprings of capitalist development, as well as underdevelopment; accordingly, Frank did not neglect to do this, at least in broad outline. The roots of capitalist evolution, he said, were to be found in the rise of a world ‘commercial network’, developing into a ‘mercantile capitalist system’. Thus ‘a commercial network spread out from Italian cities such as Venice and later Iberian and Northwestern European towns to incorporate the Mediterranean world and sub-Saharan Africa and the adjacent Atlantic Islands in the fifteenth century . . . until the entire face of the globe had been incorporated into a single organic mercantilist or mercantile capitalist, and later also industrial and financial, system, whose metropolitan centre developed in Western Europe and then in North America and whose peripheral satellites underdeveloped on all the remaining continents.’ [5] With the rise of this system, there was ‘created a whole series of metropolis-satellite relationships, interlinked as in the surplus appropriation chain noted above’. As the ‘core’ end of the chain developed, the ‘peripheral’ end simultaneously underdeveloped.

Frank did not go much further than this in filling out his view of capitalism as a whole, its origins and development. But he was unambiguous in locating the dynamic of capitalist expansion in the rise of a world commercial network, while specifying the roots of both growth and backwardness in the ‘surplus appropriation chain’ which emerged in the expansionary process: [6] surplus appropriation by the core from the periphery, and the organization of the satellite’s internal mode of production to serve the needs of the metropolis. In this way, Frank set the stage for ceasing to locate the dynamic of capitalist development in a self-expanding process of capital accumulation by way of innovation in the core itself. Thus, for Frank, the accumulation of capital in the core depends, on the one hand, upon a process of original surplus creation in the periphery and surplus transfer to the core and, on the other hand, upon the imposition of a raw-material-producing, export-dependent economy upon the periphery to fit the productive and consumptive requirements of the core.

It has been left for Immanuel Wallerstein to carry to its logical conclusion the system outlined by Frank. Just as Frank and others have sought to find the sources of underdevelopment in the periphery in its relationship with the core, Wallerstein has sought to discover the roots of development in the core in its relationship with the periphery. Indeed, in his magisterial work, The Origins of the Modern World System, [7] Wallerstein attempts nothing less than to establish the origins of capitalist development and underdevelopment and to locate the mainsprings of their subsequent evolutions.

WALLERSTEIN’S SYSTEM

Wallerstein aims to systematize the elements of the preliminary sketch put forward in Frank’s work. His focus is on what he terms the ‘world economy’, defined negatively by contrast with the preceding universal ‘world empires’. So the world empires, which ended up by dominating all economies prior to the modern one, prevented economic development through the effects of their overarching bureaucracies, which absorbed masses of economic surplus and prevented its accumulation in the form of productive investments. In this context, Wallerstein declares that the essential condition for modern economic development was the collapse of world empire, and the prevention of the emergence of any new one from the sixteenth century until the present. Wallerstein can argue in this way because of what he sees to be the immanent developmental dynamic of unfettered world trade. Left to develop on its own, that is without the suffocating impact of the world empires, developing commerce will bring with it an ever more efficient organization of production through ever increasing regional specialization—in particular, through allowing for a more effective distribution by region of what Wallerstein terms systems of ‘labour control’ in relation to the world’s regional distribution of natural resources and population. The trade-induced world division of labour will, in turn, give rise to an international structure of unequally powerful nation states: a structure which, through maintaining and consolidating the world division of labour, determines an accelerated process of accumulation in certain regions (the core), while enforcing a cycle of backwardness in others (the periphery). [8]

Without, for the moment, further attempting to clarify Wallerstein’s argument, it can be clearly seen that his master conceptions of world economy and world empire were developed to distinguish the modern economy, which can and does experience systematic economic development, from the pre-capitalist economies (called world empires), which were capable only of redistributing a relatively inflexible product, because they could expand production only within definite limits. Such a distinction is both correct and necessary. For capitalism differs from all pre-capitalist modes of production in its systematic tendency to unprecedented, though neither continuous nor unlimited, economic development—in particular through the expansion of what might be called (after Marx’s terminology) relative as opposed to absolute surplus labour. That is, under capitalism, surplus is systematically achieved for the first time through increases of labour productivity, leading to the cheapening of goods and a greater total output from a given labour force (with a given working day, intensity of labour and real wage). This makes it possible for the capitalist class to increase its surplus, without necessarily having to resort to methods of increasing absolute surplus labour which dominated pre-capitalist modes—i.e. the extension of the working day, the intensification of work, and the decrease in the standard of living of the labour force. [9]

To be specific, a society can achieve increases in labour productivity leading to increases in relative surplus product/labour when it can produce a greater mass of use values with the same amount of labour as previously. Put another way, a given labour force achieves an increase in labour productivity when it can produce the means of production and means of subsistence which makes possible its own reproduction (continued existence) in less time than previously (working at the same intensity); or when, given the same amount of time worked as before, it produces a larger surplus above the means of production and means of subsistence necessary to reproduce itself than previously. This cannot take place without qualitative changes, innovations in the forces of production, which have historically required the accumulation of surplus, i.e. ‘plough back of surplus’, into production. The basis, in turn, for the operation of this mechanism as a more or less regular means to bring about economic development was a system of production organized on the basis of capitalist social-productive or class relations. As Marx put it, relative surplus value ‘presupposes that the working day is already divided into two parts, necessary labour and surplus labour. In order to prolong the surplus labour, the necessary labour is shortened by methods for producing the equivalent of the wage of labour in a shorter time. The production of absolute surplus-value turns exclusively on the length of the working day, whereas the production of relative surplus-value completely revolutionizes the technical processes of labour and the groupings into which society is divided. It therefore requires a specifically capitalist mode of production, a mode of production which, along with its methods, means and conditions, arises and develops spontaneously on the basis of the formal subsumption of labour under capital. This formal subsumption is then replaced by a real subsumption.’ (emphasis added). [10]

A CRUCIAL OBJECTION

It is the fundamental difficulty in Wallerstein’s argument that he can neither confront nor explain the fact of a systematic development of relative surplus labour based on growth of the productivity of labour as a regular and dominant feature of capitalism. In essence, his view of economic development is quantitative, revolving around: 1. the growth in size of the system itself through expansion; 2. the rearrangement of the factors of production through regional specialization to achieve greater efficiency; 3. the transfer of surplus. Thus, according to Wallerstein, the collapse of world empire made possible a worldwide system of trade and division of labour. This, in turn, determined that what for Wallerstein were the three fundamental conditions for the development of the world economy would be fulfilled: ‘an expansion of the geographical size of the world in question [incorporation], the development of variegated methods of labor control for different products and different zones of the world economy [specialization] and the creation of relatively strong state machinery in what would become the core states of this capitalist world economy [to assure transfer of surplus to the core]. (mws. p. 38.) However, as we shall show, neither the expansion of trade leading to the incorporation of greater human and natural material resources, nor the transfer of surplus leading to the build-up of wealth in the core, nor the specialization of labour control systems leading to more effective ruling-class surplus extraction can determine a process of economic development. This is because these cannot determine the rise of a system which ‘develops itself spontaneously’; which can and must continually ‘revolutionize out and out the technical processes of labour and composition of society’.

Wallerstein does not, in the last analysis, take into account the development of the forces of production through a process of accumulation by means of innovation (‘accumulation of capital on an extended scale’), in part because to do so would undermine his notion of the essential role of the underdevelopment of the periphery in contributing to the development of the core, through surplus transfer to underwrite accumulation there. More directly, Wallerstein cannot—and in fact does not—account for the systematic production of relative surplus product, because he mislocates the mechanism behind accumulation via innovation in ‘production for profit on the market’: ‘The essential feature of a capitalist world economy . . . is production for sale in a market in which the object is to realise the maximum profit. In such a system, production is constantly expanded as long as further production is profitable, and men constantly innovate new ways of producing things that expand their profit margin.’ (rfd, p. 398.)

Now, there is no doubt that capitalism is a system in which production for a profit via exchange predominates. But does the opposite hold true? Does the appearance of widespread production ‘for profit in the market’ signal the existence of capitalism, and more particularly a system in which, as a characteristic feature, ‘production is constantly expanded and men constantly innovate new ways of producing’. Certainly not, because production for exchange is perfectly compatible with a system in which it is either unnecessary or impossible, or both, to reinvest in expanded, improved production in order to ‘profit’. Indeed, we shall argue that this is the norm in pre-capitalist societies. For in such societies the social relations of production in large part confine the realization of surplus labour to the methods of extending absolute labour. The increase of relative surplus labour cannot become a systematic feature of such modes of production.

To state the case schematically: ‘production for profit via exchange’ will have the systematic effect of accumulation and the development of the productive forces only when it expresses certain specific social relations of production, namely a system of free wage labour, where labour power is a commodity. Only where labour has been separated from possession of 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. Only where they are free, will such combination appear feasible and desirable. Only where they are free, will such combination be necessitated. Only under conditions of free wage labour will the individual producing units (combining labour power and the means of production) be forced to sell in order to buy, to buy in order to survive and reproduce, and ultimately to expand and innovate in order to maintain this position in relationship to other competing productive units. Only under such a system, where both capital and labour power are thus commodities—and which was therefore called by Marx ‘generalized commodity production’—is there the necessity of producing at the ‘socially necessary’ labour time in order to survive, and to surpass this level of productivity to ensure continued survival.

What therefore accounts for capitalist economic development is that the class (property/surplus extraction) structure of the economy as a whole determines that the reproduction carried out by its component ‘units’ is dependent upon their ability to increase their production (accumulate) and thereby develop their forces of production, in order to increase the productivity of labour and so cheapen their commodities. In contrast, pre-capitalist economies, even those in which trade is widespread, can develop only within definite limits, because the class structure of the economy as a whole determines that their component units—specifically those producing the means of subsistence and means of production, i.e. means of survival and reproduction, rather than luxuries—neither can nor must systematically increase the forces of production, the productivity of labour, in order to reproduce themselves.

If, then, the class-structured system of reproduction in which labour power is a commodity lies behind capitalist economic development, while ‘production for profit in the market’ cannot in itself determine the development of the productive forces, it follows that the historical problem of the origins of capitalist economic development in relation to pre-capitalist modes of production becomes that of the origin of the property/surplus extraction system (class system) of free wage labour—the historical process by which labour power and the means of production become commodities. Wallerstein, like Gunder Frank, is explicit in his renunciation of this position. Consistently he argues that since ‘production on the market for profit’ determines capitalist economic development, the problem of the origins of capitalism comes down to the origins of the expanding world market, unfettered by world empire. He is at pains to distinguish the emergence of the capitalist world economy in the sixteenth century—the rise of the world division of labour which emerged with the great discoveries and expansion of trade routes—from the emergence of a system of free wage labour, and contends that the latter is derivative from the former.

I am not particularly versed in Marxist literature, so this is quite useful as an introductory text. I found the point that Brenner made about class relations not solely being an effect of capitalism a useful reminder, as I have found myself getting it the wrong way round as it were.

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