Re: mercantile capitalism

[Jurriaan Bendien <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As far as I understand it, a theme in the controversy about mercantile
capitalism was whether you could call a society such as 18th century Holland
with developed commercial relations (but still a large rural population;
industrialisation took off late in Holland, namely in the last quarter of
the 19th century) "capitalist", even although it did not yet feature
large-scale capitalist industry. Following Wallersteinian logic, you might
well call it capitalism, namely mercantile capitalism. If you did so, then
the question was raised about what the "capitalist mode of production"
really referred to. In the case of Andre Gunder Frank, this type of
controversy led him to abandon the concept of "mode of production"
altogether. However, Ernest Mandel and Kozo Uno among others took quite a
different approach. This approach depends on distinguishing carefully
between "capital" and "capitalist production". Capital, i.e. value in search
of a surplus value, money used to make more money, existed for thousands of
years even prior to the advent of "pockets" of capitalistic production,
which emerged both in China and in Europe. This capital could be usury
capital, bank capital, merchant capital, and so forth. But the existence of
capital did not imply "capitalism" except in some vague sense as "the
pursuit of increasing one's capital". The real problem was to understand the
processes by which production for the market becomes generalised over time,
i.e. the processes of marketisation, and these processes are not simply
economic, but cultural, technological, social and political. Only when
substantial means of production and labour have become tradeable objects,
Mandel and Uno argue, can we begin to speak of a genuinely capitalist mode
of production, and what this means is that almost the entire production
process of an economic community is now marketised, and becomes dominated by
capital. When Marx refers to the capitalist mode of production, he similarly
has in mind capitalist industry, the subordination of production to the
rules of capital, and he concerns himself with the industrialisation process
in its capitalist form. This means, in effect, that capital has become the
regulative force of the entire economic process, and that the capitalist
mode of production becomes an organic, self-reproducing social totality
which, swung into orbit as it were, follows its own trajectory, ultimately
determined by its own inner laws, contradictions and regularities, what Marx
calls the law(s) of motion of capitalism, even although the specific way in
which these laws, contradictions and regularities might work themselves out,
depend greatly on the specific (geographic, social, cultural, political)
environment within which it operates. The question then is, how do we date
the beginning of the capitalist mode of production in the proper sense of
the word. Mandel takes the view, that the starting point is the 1820s or so,
i.e. the emergence of a world market in industrially-produced goods, and he
reserves the term "capitalism" for "the capitalist mode of production". He
reserves the concept of a "mode of production" for an organic,
self-reproducing social totality featuring a specific combination of forces
of production (means of production and labour power) and relations of
production (ownership. work and reproductive relations). Following Louis
Althusser, he distinguishes between a mode of production and a social
formation, the latter containing the former as well as other institutions,
namely political institutions and the institutions of civil society, which
Marx did not analyse systematically. In that case, a society like 19th
century Holland was not really "capitalist", but a hybrid formation
combining feudal relations and bourgeois-commercial relations, or if you
like, an articulation of modes of production intertwined with each other
(although manufactories and cottage industries were not very significant at
that time). That is to say, transitional epochs occur in history in which
one mode of production gradually displaces another, through technological
revolutions, social revolutions and incremental processes.  For Mandel, this
historical debate was not entirely scholastic, because it had a direct
bearing on the transition to socialism. You had to be able to say clearly
when a society was capitalist, and when it was no longer capitalist, and
what the transition to socialism would mean. For Mandel, the transition to
socialism meant essentially the displacement, over time, of markets by other
methods of resource allocation, which, at least in outline, had already been
developed within the capitalist mode of production. It would mean in the
first instance, that capital and labour could no longer be freely traded,
but that resource allocation would be subject to social priorities and
social regulation determined by the political state. The crucial criterion
here was whether private ownership of the majority of means of production
and exchange was maintained, or whether this was replaced by social, public
and state ownership, because it was this institution of private ownership of
social assets that formed the basis of the class power of the bourgeoisie.

J.