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CHAPTER 1
The Transition Debate: Theories and Critique
In order to examine the object of our investigation in its integrity, free from all disturbing subsidiary circumstances, we must treat the whole world as one nation, and assume that capitalist production is everywhere established and has possessed itself of every branch of industry.
Karl Marx, 1867
... events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.
Karl Marx, 1877
Introduction
In this chapter, we critically assess a number of influential Marxist-inspired theorisations of the transition to capitalism. We focus on such Marxist-inspired perspectives not because they exhaust the range of possible approaches to theorising the transition or because we think other perspectives have nothing to offer. Rather, we centre our attention on them because the Marxist tradition has arguably examined and debated the subject of capitalism's genesis more than any other social theoretical tradition. For these reasons, our critical examination of other important perspectives to capitalism's origins is in later chapters – Smithian approaches in Chapter 5, new institutionalism in Chapter 7, and neo-Weberian historical sociology and the California School in Chapter 8.
The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section examines World-Systems approaches to the origins of capitalism, particularly through an engagement with the works of its most influential representative and 'founder', Immanuel Wallerstein. While highlighting the important contributions that World-System Theory (WST) has made to the study of capitalism's genesis over the longue durée, we nonetheless argue that this approach – especially Wallerstein's rendition of it – remains hamstrung by two particularly debilitating problems: the unwitting reproduction of Eurocentrism that erases non-European agency; and the inability to provide a sufficiently historicised conception of capitalism.
The next section investigates the 'Brenner thesis' and the theoretical apparatus (Political Marxism) that Robert Brenner's works on the transition to capitalism have engendered. We focus on three particularly problematic and interconnected issues in their theorisation of capitalism's inception: first, their commitment to a methodologically internalist and concomitant Eurocentric (or Anglocentric) analysis of the origins of capitalism; second, the resulting deficiencies in their examination of the relationship between the making of capitalism and geopolitics; and third, their highly abstract and minimalist conception of capitalism.
In the third section, we consider the merits and problems of post-colonialism. The inclusion of postcolonial studies in our overview of the different approaches within the transition debate might seem unusual given that postcolonial scholars have predominantly focused on the experiences of modernity outside – and subsequent to – the emergence of capitalism in Europe. The existence of capitalism is then something largely taken for granted by postcolonial studies – a point that we argue limits their ability to fully 'provincialise' Europe. We nonetheless also draw out the important methodological and theoretical contributions postcolonialism offers in the study of capitalism's origins – contributions that we seek to take up and further develop in the chapters that follow.
The 'Commercialisation Model' Revisited: WorldSystems Analysis and the Transition to Capitalism
The Making of the Modern World-System: The Wallerstein Thesis
The most systematic exposition of WST can be found in the works of Immanuel Wallerstein, who sought to bring together longue durée history writing with the anti-hegemonic politics of the 1960s Third World movements. From dependency theorists Wallerstein took the importance of colonisation in order to explain unequal regional differentiation between the capitalist core and periphery. From Sweezy and Braudel came the emphasis on the 'world-system' as the unit of analysis, and relatedly the importance of trade and exchange. Finally, Wallerstein emphasised the historical specificity of the crisis of feudalism and the collapse of world empires as a precondition for the emergence of the capitalist world-system. This was because Wallerstein was additionally concerned with how to denaturalise capitalism, and so explore the possibility of its eventual demise. At the heart of this project was then establishing the historical specificity of capitalism by:
reopen[ing] the question of how and when the capitalist world-economy was created in the first place; why the transition took place in feudal Europe and not elsewhere; why it took place when it did and not earlier or later [and]; why earlier attempts of transition failed.
The specificity of the capitalist world-system is explained through a negative comparison with the social form that preceded it, world empires. The latter were integrated systems of political rule which controlled and exploited differentiated communities on a regional and sometimes inter-regional basis. According to Wallerstein, world empires restricted economic development because large state bureaucracies would absorb surpluses appropriated from agrarian production, hindering or precluding the accumulation of capital and (re)investment in production. The collapse of world empires was a precondition for the emergence of capitalism, for it released profit-seeking commercial activities from the fetters of overarching imperial states. Now unrestrained, production would be 'constantly expanded as long as further production is profitable', and capitalists would 'constantly innovate new ways of producing things that expand their profit margin'. Consequently, trade tended towards constant expansion and subsumption – 'an expansion of the geographical size of the world in question' – which created a capitalist world economy by progressively 'incorporating' greater proportions of economic activity into its own 'logic'. This subsumption of 'non-capitalist zones' into the capitalist world-system took place 'through colonization, conquest, or economic and political domination'.
At the heart of this expansion was an ever-increasing regional specialisation and a world division of labour. From this perspective, Wallerstein distinguished the emergence of the world-system via overseas expansion from the freeing of labour, deriving the latter from the former. That is, the world-system is capitalist not because it involves the systematic exploitation of formally free wage-labour throughout its regions, but rather because it is characterised by different societies' integration into a transnational network of market exchanges and trade. Wallerstein effectively denies the necessity of the wage-labour side of the capital relation for his definition of capitalism itself, writing for example that:
The point is that 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. Free labor is indeed a defining feature of capitalism, but not free labor throughout the productive enterprises. Free labor is the form of labor control used for skilled work in core countries whereas coerced labor is used for less skilled work in peripheral areas. The combination thereof is the essence of capitalism.
It is only with the capitalist world-system that we find different localities integrated into a single but differentiated world-system – a unified division of labour distinguished along the hierarchical axes of core, semi-periphery and periphery. This unequal relationship is the sine qua non of capitalism for Wallerstein, in which differences between core (Western) and peripheral (non-Western) states determine the transfer of surplus from the latter to the former. This allowed for the observation that just as the core was experiencing an extensive freeing of labour, it was also siphoning off, via unequal exchange, huge amounts of surplus from unfree, coerced labour in the periphery, leaving the periphery in a permanent condition of developmental 'backwardness'.
Hence, part of the value of WST is to situate capitalist exploitation in this broader – international – grid of power and economic relations, beyond the singular act of an individual wage-labourer being exploited within the unit of production. As such, the importance of international hierarchy, exploitation, and more broadly unequal power relations, is revealed. And by distinguishing this world-system from preceding world empires, Wallerstein's approach usefully emphasises the historical specificity and transience of such a hierarchical, exploitative system. These two elements – historical specificity and global hierarchies – can most certainly be considered the potential primary strengths of WST. However, on both counts WST ultimately fails to deliver. As we shall see, its identification of historical specificity is ill defined, to the point of missing it, and core-periphery relations are circumscribed by a problematic Eurocentrism that elides 'peripheral agency'. We now turn to these criticisms in further detail.
The Problem of Eurocentrism
One of the benefits of Wallerstein's emphasis on the world-system as the appropriate unit of analysis is that it has necessitated the study of societies outside of Europe. WST is prolific in this regard, with applications as diverse as the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, Africa, South Asia, East Asia and Latin America. But, for all of Wallerstein's emphasis on the world-system as the unit of analysis, we find within his version of WST a pervasive internalism which underpins some unfortunate – if not intentional – Eurocentric assumptions.
First and foremost, the operative concepts in WST such as 'division of labour' and 'specialization' are derived from an internalist classical social theory par excellence, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. These are then extrapolated in an unmediated fashion onto the international scale without considering how it might refashion such concepts. Falling prey to the 'fallacy of the domestic analogy', WST leaves the distinct determinations arising from the coexistence and interaction of a multiplicity of differentiated societies ('the international') untheorised as their own unique domain of social interactions. Instead, these intersocietal determinations are functionally subsumed under the overriding operative logic of a singularly conceived world-system.
This inside-out method is replicated in WST's study of history. Despite the high degree of emphasis on exogenous, global factors, WST cannot get away from an ontologically singular Eurocentric 'logic of immanence'. Consequently, Wallerstein reproduces the typically Eurocentric view that the transition from feudalism to capitalism took place uniquely and autonomously within the clearly demarcated spatial confines of Europe. Although Asian empires displayed signs of potential development towards capitalism, it was the crisis of feudalism in Europe between 1300 and 1450 'whose resolution was the historic emergence of a capitalist world-economy located in that particular geographical arena'.
World history subsequently became about how this European creation spread outwards and 'eventually expanded to cover the entire globe, eliminating in the process all remaining redistributive world-economies and reciprocal mini-systems'. In short, social transformations from the 16th century onwards are understood in the Eurocentric terms of linear developmentalism, in which European social forms are transmitted to 'the East'. In this approach, we find a typically Eurocentric distinction between an atavistic and despotic East and a capitalist West, now recast as periphery and core respectively. In this schema, 'the West' is once again presented 'as the pioneering creator of modernity', and 'the East' as 'a regressive and unexceptional entity that is incapable of capitalist self-generation'; an undifferentiated, passive transmitter of surplus to the core. This leads to a double 'elision of Eastern agency'. 'Eastern' elites are seen to voluntarily follow 'Western dictates in order to better secure their own material reproduction within the capitalist world-system'. Meanwhile, non-Western forms of resistance are either overlooked or seen to unintentionally and passively reproduce the capitalist world-system.
This latter issue is especially striking given Marx's theorisation of the distinct processes of subsumption through which capitalism could expand. For Marx, subsumption involved the possession, subordination and subsequent transformation of the labour process into a form compatible with capital's tendency to self-valorisation. The two chief moments of this process – formal and real subsumption – refer specifically to instances of confrontation with extant labour processes. Formal subsumption denotes capital taking hold of preexisting forms of production, leaving them intact, and extracting surplus from the labour process as it is given. Real subsumption, in contrast, refers to instances where pre-existing labour processes are either transformed, or destroyed and created anew in the image of capital.
In both cases, the character of subsumption and the relation between labour and capital are determined in and through class conflicts, through which direct producers attempt to resist, restrict, or perversely enable 'the form and extent of ruling-class access to surplus labour'. That is, the 'world division of labour' the differentiated and multiple forms in which production is oriented to capital - is not simply a function of capital, wherein different forms of exploitation emerge due to the technical requirements of profit-maximisation. It is, rather, the result of the multiple and variegated outcomes of the struggles of capital with whatever methods of production it encounters. The failure of WST to confront the multiple nonlinear histories through which capitalism has been configured and reconfigured in the course of such struggles consequently involves writing the history of the 'periphery' out of the history of the 'core'.
This points to a more substantive issue in Wallerstein's analysis: the strict binary distinction between non-capitalist and capitalist modes of production excludes the possibility of their coexistence and hence combination. This is a debilitating problem, since it leaves any theorisation of the transition to capitalism largely indeterminate. As Eric Mielants suggests:
The concept of an 'age of transition' can be interpreted as requiring the operation of at least two coexisting modes of production, and the eventual domination of one over the other. If we want to analyse the rise of one mode of production and the demise of another, at some point we have to acknowledge them as working together. If not, one is left with the argument that feudalism simply disappeared within Europe during the 16th century.
Similarly, for C. P. Terlouw:
During this long transitional phase, feudalism was slowly transformed into, and superseded by capitalism. This can only mean that during at least two centuries feudalism and capitalism coexisted in one world-system. So what Wallerstein explicitly denies (the coexistence of two modes of production in one world-system) he implicitly assumes for the period between 1450 and 1650. If one accepts that during a very long period, several modes of production coexisted in one single system, it is a small, and completely logical step to admit that at any moment in the history of the world-system several modes production could exist simultaneously.
This inability to theorise the coexistence and interaction of multiple modes of production is at the heart of Wallerstein's Eurocentrism. Since social relations that existed prior to capitalist incorporation are rendered irrelevant to our understanding of developments 'post-incorporation', we are left with a picture of the world-system devoid of differentiation in terms of either agency or outcomes. In Ernesto Laclau's words, Wallerstein's world-system is a 'vacant and homogenous totality' that is both historically and theoretically 'created by eliminating differences rather than articulating them'. By denying the coexistence of multiple, differentiated modes of production, WST negates societal difference and multiplicity, and the interactions that stem from them. The very mechanism through which the history of the 'non-West' could be brought into the history of 'the West' is theoretically and historically occluded from the outset.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "How the West Came to Rule"
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Copyright © 2015 Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nijancioglu.
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