[Marxism] Precapitalist property relations?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Leo and Sam,

I plan to read your entire NLR article in all its interesting detail but 
there is one thing that caught my eye:

"Though the mercantile empires of Europe?s absolutist states were present 
at capitalism?s birth, the first empire to be driven by capitalist 
logic­pursuing profits through the creation of value in competitive 
production rather than simply through exchange, and exporting capitalist 
property relations to its colonies­-was that of Britain. Yet even as the 
19th-century British state extended its territorial colonial empire, it was 
also pioneering a new type of ?informal imperialism?: sponsoring foreign 
investment and bilateral trade-and-?friendship? treaties outside the 
administrative Empire, and even allowing other capitals to have access to 
these markets. Britain thus played the leading role in the extension of 
some of the key conditions for the operation of the law of value 
internationally, from the free-trade policy to the gold standard. Herein 
lay the seeds of the epochal shift from pre-capitalist territorial 
imperialisms to capitalist imperialism of the modern type.

"That said, there was a continuing tension between the imperatives of 
capitalism and those of British colonialism. Even as it exported capitalist 
property relations to its dominions, Britain also oversaw, and in some 
cases even reinforced, pre-capitalist ones."

This obviously is in line with Ellen Meiksins Wood's analysis, which also 
makes a sharp distinction between capitalist property relations driven by 
the logic of profit and "precapitalist" property relations that seemed to 
exist everywhere except in England.

Recently I had an exchange with Neil Davidson about bourgeois revolutions 
and the transition to capitalism, based on his Historical Materialism 
article. He made the very useful observation that the Brenner-Wood theory 
of capitalism has much in common with that of the Vienna school 
libertarians who also make market exchange on the basis of profit a 'sine 
qua non.' I agree strongly with Davidson on this point. I also found his 
delving into the Grundrisse useful, especially his reference to Marx's 
statement that capitalism could have arisen anywhere--not just in Great 
Britain.

I found myself poking into the Grundrisse a bit, although I had to get over 
a certain prejudice against the work based on my perception that it was 
strictly the bailiwick of Marxist academics just as the novels of Jane 
Austen are the bailiwick of the MLA. I honed in on the sections that have 
been published separately as "Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations," which 
seems very germane to the matter at hand.

For Marx, "pre-capitalist" is a category very much tied up with the 
production of use values, or what is often called 'the natural economy'. 
Maurice Bloch wrote a number of books that described societies based on 
such social relationships. This is what Marx says:

>>The crucial point here is this: in all these forms, where landed 
property and agriculture form the basis of the economic order, and 
consequently the economic object is the production of use values ? i.e., 
the reproduction of the individual in certain definite relationships to his 
community, of which it forms the basis ? we find the following elements:

1. Appropriation of the natural conditions of labor, of the earth as the 
original instrument of labor, both laboratory and repository of its raw 
materials; however, appropriation not by means of labor, but as the 
preliminary condition of labor. The individual simply regards the objective 
conditions of labor as his own, as the inorganic nature of this 
subjectivity, which realizes itself through them. The chief objective 
condition of labor itself appears not as the product of labor, but occurs 
as nature. On the one hand, we have the living individual, on the other the 
earth, as the objective condition of his reproduction.

2. The attitude to the land, to the earth, as the property of the working 
individual, means that a man appears from the start as something more than 
the abstraction of the ?working individual?, but has an objective mode of 
existence in his ownership of the earth, which is antecedent to his 
activity and does not appear as its mere consequence, and is as much a 
precondition of his activity as his skin, his senses, for whole skin and 
sense organs are also developed, reproduced, etc., in the process of life, 
they are also presupposed by it. What immediately mediates this attitude is 
the more or less naturally evolved, more or less historically evolved and 
modified existence of the individual as a member of a community ? his 
primitive existence as part of a tribe, etc.<<

Needless to say, this is not about the creation of commodities.

However, everywhere that England established colonies--whether or not free 
labor or markets prevailed--commodity production prevailed. This was true 
of the slavery-based sugar plantations of the Caribbeans or the mines of 
South Africa, which involved all forms of coercion.

I would hope that you would avoid the temptation of using terms like 
"pre-capitalist territorial imperialisms" without rolling up your sleeves 
and doing the hard work necessary to define them. This is something that 
has always annoyed me about Ellen Meiksins Wood's forays into these 
questions. When you write a book titled "The Origin of Capitalism", as she 
did, and devote a single paragraph to slavery, something is obviously wrong.

Louis Proyect

--

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