Robert Brenner and primitive accumulation

(This is the first in a series of articles on the Brenner thesis, aka the Transition Debate)

 

Robert Brenner

A series of blog entries on Lenin’s Tomb defending the Brenner thesis has inspired and piqued me to return to the transition debate. Richard Seymour, aka Leninology, is a graduate student originally from Ireland and a member of the British SWP. In keeping with “Leninist norms,” the SWP does not have public debates about current campaigns or on the “Russian question”, but members do express a range of opinions about the “transition debate”. For instance, party leader Chris Harman has debated Robert Brenner, defending a position more or less midway between Brenner and Jim Blaut.

For people unfamiliar with this debate, a word or two might be useful. In the 1950s, there was a series of exchanges between Paul Sweezy and Maurice Dobb over the origins of capitalism prompted by Sweezy’s review of Dobb’s “Studies in the Development of Capitalism” in Science and Society. Dobb was seen as explaining the rise of capitalism as a function of the introduction of market mechanisms in the British countryside, while Sweezy emphasized a rise in international trade in the late Middle Ages especially with Asian countries, largely on the basis of research by Henri Pirenne.

The debates simmered on through the 1960s but took on a new intensity after Robert Brenner published a couple of articles in the mid-70’s defending a more extreme version of Dobb’s approach. While Sweezy and Dobb maintained a rather collegial tone with each other (both were admirers of Stalin’s USSR), Brenner was far more polemical. In 1977, he wrote a NLR article titled “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism” that charged Sweezy with mixing Adam Smith and Karl Marx, a rather amazing achievement. The article summed up Brenner’s scholarly findings on the agrarian origins of capitalism as well as took issue with the “Third Worldism” of Monthly Review authors who had become identified with something called “dependency theory”. In a nutshell, dependency theory can be described in Andre Gunder Frank’s words as “the development of underdevelopment” under imperialism, an idea that always made sense to me in light of my travels in Nicaragua, Zambia and Tanzania more than 25 years ago. Brenner wrote:

Most directly, of course, the notion of the ‘development of underdevelopment’ opens the way to third-worldist ideology. From the conclusion that development occurred only in the absence of links with accumulating capitalism in the metropolis, it can be only a short step to the strategy of semi-autarkic socialist development. Then the utopia of socialism in one country replaces that of the bourgeois revolution—one moreover, which is buttressed by the assertion that the revolution against capitalism can come only from the periphery, since the proletariat of the core has been largely bought off as a consequence of the transfer of surplus from the periphery to the core.

In the next and concluding paragraph of this article, Brenner pins his hopes on “the current economic impasse of capitalism for working-class political action in the advanced industrial countries.” While I have neither the time nor the interest to pull together and analyze all the disparate elements of Brenner’s political thinking, this rather breathless over-projection of the tempo of the class struggle in 1977 suggests a certain affinity with another controversial article he wrote for the NLR 11 years later titled “The Economics of Global Turbulence” that basically predicted a Great Depression type meltdown in terms familiar to those who read the In Defense of Marxism website or the Militant newspaper.

As it turns out, the advanced capitalist countries have not collapsed and the “third world” struggles that Brenner dismissed continue to roil world politics. More recently, Brenner has pulled back a bit from the catastrophism of the 1998 article and has adopted a more cautious outlook, which amounted to calling for a Kerry vote in the last election.

One of the things that caught my eye when reading Richard’s blog was a comment about “primitive accumulation”. Citing Ellen Meiksins Wood, Richard writes:

For Marx’s truly Marxist take, we need to Grundrisse and Capital. In his account of “the so-called primitive accumulation” of capital, Marx moves from a conception of capital as wealth and trade to an understanding of capital as embodying a specific social relation.

Accumulation, whether from imperial theft or commerce, is not sufficient to create capitalism - it is not merely an augmentation of commerce.

A few paragraphs later, citing Robert Brenner’s “Merchants and Revolution,” Richard asserts that the East India Company was not part of this “social relation” primitive accumulation but merely another instance of commerce augmenting commerce, so to speak:

If you happen to have this book, and have been desperately flipping through pages of detail about the development of commerce, the rise of the merchant opposition, the East India company, the colonies and so on in search of the heuristic, here’s a tip: it’s in the postscript. Brenner goes to great labours to show that the merchant class was not a revolutionary class devoted to the overthrow of feudalism.

I scratched my head when I read this and wondered why it didn’t sit right with me. I then googled “East India Company” and “Karl Marx” and came up with a link to chapter 31 in volume one of Capital (”The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist”) that referred to the East India Company as an example of “primitive accumulation . . .without the advance of a shilling.” Reading further, I discovered that chapter 31 was riddled with reference to colonies and various forms of non-market activity as expressions of primitive accumulation:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.

The different momenta of primitive accumulation distribute 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. These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the State, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.

In order to understand where Wood got her ideas on primitive accumulation, you can turn to Brenner’s 1977 NLR article, where there’s also an attempt to define primitive accumulation strictly in terms of the British peasants being separated from their means of production. It is based on what Marx wrote in chapter 26 (”The Secret of Primitive Accumulation”) of Capital:

As Marx puts it [in chapter 26], ‘There can therefore be nothing more ridiculous than to conceive this original formation of capital as if capital had stockpiled and created the objective conditions of production—necessaries, raw materials, instruments—and then offered them to the worker, who was bare of these possessions.’ (Marx’s emphasis). At the same time, ‘In themselves, money and commodities are no more capital than the means of production and subsistence are. They need to be transformed into capital . . . So-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.’

Well, that’s true–as far as it goes. If Marx had never written chapter 31 with all those references to colonization, slavery and trading monopolies being necessary for the birth of industrial capitalism, then Brenner and Wood would have a more convincing case.

But it is not just chapter 31 of Capital. While the “nothing else” quote from chapter 26 offered up by Brenner like a lawyer summarizing his case is quite convincing, there are contradictory, even neo-Smithian presentations of the problem by Marx and Engels, to use Brenner’s terminology. Take for example the Communist Manifesto, which is about as central to the Marxist literature as you can get. The first section on “Bourgeois and Proletarians” deals with the origins of the bourgeoisie:

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

This seems rather straightforward, doesn’t it? The bourgeoisie came from the towns, not the countryside, and “trade with the colonies” (plunder, in actuality) gave an impulse to the “revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society“. If, according to Richard, “Brenner goes to great labours to show that the merchant class was not a revolutionary class devoted to the overthrow of feudalism,” why didn’t he take the additional step to explain why Marx came up with all these “neo-Smithian” formulations in volume one of Capital and the Communist Manifesto? It doesn’t really require “great labours” to do so, only access to a personal computer and a knowledge of how to use google. Now I understand that google didn’t exist in 1977, but surely somebody with Brenner’s reputation as a world-class Marxist scholar would have taken the trouble to check the index of volume one of Capital for all occurrences of “primitive accumulation,” not just ones cherry-picked to support his own thesis.

It is also worth considering whether or not the chapter 26 definition of primitive accumulation (internal; market-oriented; agrarian) makes sense in Marx’s own terms. Keep in mind that Marx was trying to refute Adam Smith, who believed that thrift could explain the original capital that was used to fund manufacturing and industry. If this is the case, what does the Enclosure Acts, etc. really have to do with making capital available? Creating market conditions in the British countryside does not necessarily lead to a pool of capital. It seems much more likely that piracy, slavery, and colonialism will do the trick.

In my own view, the fact that Marx contradicts himself in chapters 26 and 31 simply points to a weakness in his approach to the problem of how capitalism arose. While most of his efforts were focused on identifying its origins within Western European countries, and Great Britain in particular, there was never that much attention paid to Africa, Latin America or Asia. And when he did turn his attention to Asia, he was wrong as the “Asiatic Mode of Production” would indicate. Despite his references to the East India Company, slavery and silver mining, you cannot really find a fully developed analysis of the mode of production in the colonial world. And the one reference that does exist–chapter 33 of Capital, v. 1, titled “The Modern Theory of Colonisation”–is curiously silent on the topic of slavery and indigenous peoples. Over the summer as I blog on these topics, I will try to sketch out an approach that does justice to colonial capitalism.

I want to conclude with a discussion of what Maurice Dobb had to say about non-market forces in the early stages of capitalism. Despite Robert Brenner’s efforts to represent himself as carrying on the tradition of Maurice Dobb, there are ample signs that the British historian believed that “extra-economic” factors were critical to the development of capitalism in Great Britain. His arguments can be found in chapter 5 of “Studies in the Development of Capitalism” (aptly titled “Capital Accumulation and Mercantilism”) and can be summarized in his own words as follows:

In short, the Mercantile System was a system of State-regulated exploitation through trade which played a highly important role in the adolescence of capitalist industry: it was essentially the economic policy of primitive accumulation.

In trying to explain the origins of capitalism, Dobb takes exactly the opposite approach from Robert Brenner: “Least of all was it [capital accumulation] likely to happen under conditions approximating to free markets and perfect competition.” Indeed, in order for capitalism to take root in Great Britain, it was necessary to resort to the practices described in chapter 31 of Capital. Specifically, “there was a great deal of seizure of property and simple plunder” in order for the new bourgeoisie to assert itself. Not only was plunder necessary, an influx of precious metals in the sixteenth century created the price-inflation that could result into the transfer of land into bourgeois hands.

For Dobb, the Tudor age (1485-1603) was all about plowing colonial profits into new enterprises:

Moreover, there were indirect ways in which the prosperity of foreign trade in the Tudor Age aided industrial development in the ensuing century. Some of the fortunes made by foreign adventurers no doubt eventually found their way into industrial enterprise; while, as we shall presently see, the expansion of overseas markets, especially colonial markets, in the seventeenth century, to some extent acted as a lever to the profitability of manufacture at home.

Finally, in sharp opposition to Robert Brenner, Maurice Dobb believed that in the early days of capitalism, the British bourgeoisie sought to curtail competition. Until the labor-saving devices of the industrial revolution became available to them, they would find ways to avoid direct competition with other emerging capitalist powers. This is why trading monopolies like the East India Company were crucial for the subsequent development of free trade policies. Dobb writes, “But until the vast potentialities of the new mechanical age, and of the new division of labour introduced by machinery, had become apparent, it was understandable that even the most enterprising of the bourgeoisie should look to trade regulation and political privilege for the assurance that his enterprise would prove profitable.”

In this period, when Great Britain sought to sell its products overseas, it took full advantage of what Brenner calls “extra-economic” forces. In other words, it sought to avoid competition through political pressure just as any aspiring capitalist power does in the early stages of its development. Dobb writes:

This political pressure often sufficed, indeed, to make colonial trade forced trading and the profit from it indistinguishable from plunder. Tudor voyages of discovery (in Sombart’s words) “were often nothing more than well-organized raiding expeditions to plunder lands beyond the seas.”

In other words, Dobb agreed with Karl Marx that:

The system of protection was an artificial means of manufacturing manufacturers, of expropriating independent labourers, of capitalising the national means of production and subsistence, of forcibly abbreviating the transition from the medieval to the modern mode of production. The European states tore one another to pieces about the patent of this invention, and, once entered into the service of the surplus-value makers, did not merely lay under contribution in the pursuit of this purpose their own people, indirectly through protective duties, directly through export premiums.

As Michael Lebowitz put it in a comment on PEN-L, ” As for Brenner/Wood, they are certainly welcome to use any definition they want of capitalism— trying to pass it off as Marx’s understanding of capitalism and its tendencies is another matter, though.”

In my next post, I will explain why Robert Brenner gets it wrong in trying to apply the template of the free-market industrial revolution period to a much earlier age.