Forwarded from Abu Hartel (origins of capitalism)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'm a bit confused about the debate over the origins of capitalism. I
assume Marxists are arguing over Marx's historical account in part VIII of
Capital I?

I don't pretend to be a student of the history of early capitalism, so I'll
just stick to Marx's short discussion in volume I.

1. Someone argued that there has to be a purely economic relationship
between the means of production and the worker. I don't know what this
means. Marx argues that in early capitalism the state or coercion played a
crucial role in securing the proletariat. Do ear clipping and branding
count as an economic relationship? For good reason, Marx certainly did not
say that the relationship between the means of production and the early or
proto-proletariat was only or even mostly economic. Where does this strange
idea come from? Not chapter 28 of Capital I.

2. Another person argued the development of capitalism is only possible
after a capitalist revolution in agriculture. But again Marx argues the
opposite in part VIII. Marx argues that small scale and rural proto
industry is only finally defeated with the rise of machino-facture--that
is, the revolutionization of agriculture and the split between agriculture
and industry are effected by the rise of machino-facture while agrarian
change is not itself a sufficient condition for the rise of the industrial
capitalist. Left to itself, the development of capitalist agriculture only
proceeds slowly. For Marx, the emergence of capitalist farming and rising
agricultural productivity provide manufacture with workers, yet manufacture
then allows peasants to hold on against the onslaught of capitalist farming
because manufacture provides a market for new kinds of household rural
production. The completion of a capitalist revolution in agriculture thus
cannot on its own complete itself. Marx seems to be saying that agriculture
is not fully revolutionized-- independent peasants stand in the way of true
capitalist agriculture as they can at times dump surplus goods below their
value without jeopardizing their own reproduction--until the emergence of
large scale industrial production which finally sweeps away all forms of
rural proto industry or rural household production and thus the peasantry.

To be sure, the liberation of serfs and the forcible evictions of peasants
are a necessary condition for the rise of machino-facture which proceeds on
a large scale and thus depends on the availability of a free and rightless
proletariat (a proletariat which most certainly is subjected to more than
simply economic coercion in its early history!) And certainly labor
productivity has to rise if the agricultural sector is to support those
"released" into nascent industrial sector, but Marx explains the so called
productivity gains in English agriculture as much by the intensification of
exploitation as by its capitalization, i.e., continuous investment in new
and better means of production. The rise of capitalist agriculture--if by
that one means not simply the enclosures but an agricultural practice
actually marked by the compulsive capitalisation of surplus value and the
consequent endogeneous techno-organizational change--plays a very small
part in Marx's history of the origins of capitalism.

Agricultural surpluses cannot be invested in heavy machinery until modern
machino facture emerges, anyway. And the development of capitalist
agriculture is not a sufficient condition for the rise of modern industry.
The world market has to be formed, modern infrastructure has to be built
up, huge quantities of capital have to be amassed for that and the purchase
of machinery, supplies of otherwise of scarce raw materials have to be
secured at cheap prices, the modern state has to be created, etc.
It's hard to understand this exclusive focus on agrarian change and
perfectly free wage labor in the historiography of origins of capitalism.
Moreover, these kinds of arguments fly so obviously in the face of what
Marx wrote that one wonders what motivates the attempt to pass them off as
Marx's own.

Abu Hartal


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