Richard Hunsinger examines the origins of the capitalist mode of production through a comparative analysis of the work of Jairus Banaji and Robert Brenner.

Introduction

“Across the sea the Apocalypse rises each morning along with the sun. Don’t turn back, don’t be imprisoned by your history. Take to the sea, sever the hawsers that have kept you moored to the land, keep your mind on the prow and take to the waves. Let’s take to the waves. One world is ending, another beginning; this is the Apocalypse and we’re in the midst of it. Help me to equip the boat that will weather the storm.”¹

These words are spoken in a moment of Luther Blissett’s novel Q where our protagonist, a radical Anabaptist militant that lives the Reformation through direct, even crucial, participation in its most pivotal struggles, the Münster rebellion in the German Peasants’ War, now finds himself taken in by the members of an urban commune in Antwerp. His guide, Eloi, takes him through the streets and ports of this vibrant commercial center in order to illustrate that the Apocalypse sought by the most millenarian prophets of the struggles amongst the peasants and rural towns of the German lowlands is already well underway. A new age of capital and its production surrounds the body of the old world. The princes, priests, and lords that our soldier had come to see as not only exploiters of a faith available to all, but also of the lives and property of all, were already subsumed into an objective power greater than the fear of God: the divine world of the commodity and the command of capital, its subordination of labor required for the instantiation of their constitutive relations of exploitation. The rallying cry of Thomas Müntzer and his vanguard acolytes of the peasant war, “Omnia sunt communia,” could appear an anachronistic communism to the peasants and their capacities at the time, given their eventual and nigh inevitable defeat. Yet it also presages the determinate negation of this new order from the negated classes themselves. Even at its origins, the capitalist epoch’s transience could be glimpsed.

The language of “Apocalypse” carries through into our own time, one in which similar horizons of struggle are certainly not absent, but the paths beyond them remain obscure. The desire to understand the dynamics of social transformation lie at the heart of the question of the origins of the capitalist mode of production, often known popularly as the “transition” debates. In 1950, Paul Sweezy opened his text The Transition From Feudalism to Capitalism with the words “We live in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism; and this fact lends particular interest to studies of earlier transitions from one social system to another.” Immanuel Wallerstein of World Systems Theory fame would dedicate his work to “those who are seeking to understand the world-systemic transition from capitalism to socialism in which we are living, and thereby to contribute to it.”² The late 20th century’s collapse of the dreams of world socialism would go on to make these statements appear presumptuous at best, and gravely mistaken at worst. We now live in a time where capitalism’s global triumph has given way to deepening cyclical crises, emerging and intensifying almost as suddenly as this victory over its alternatives was hailed. Even as the apparent horizon beyond capital appears to recede, its ultimate transience makes itself apparent more than ever, inscribed in the immiserated lives that it reproduces the world over.

While the sense of an Apocalypse prevails, epochs do not necessarily come to complete ends, conforming to the quantifications we may come to expect from our own objectified sense of historical time, where the telos of capital accumulation and value relations become synonymous with history as a reified trajectory of indefinite progress. Dynamics of social transformation may emerge from within an apparent disintegration of social systems, but cannot necessarily be said to be automatic occurrences. The optimism of the historians and theorists of the 20th century attest to this, as their prognoses can only be understood as conclusions in which the political viability of such economic revolutionizations of social life was present, albeit in forms contested by those internal to these historical movements themselves. The various debates over the origins of capitalism can then be said to also bear an imprint of political implications which bear critical inspection.

What are the political stakes of any question regarding the origins of the capitalist mode of production? This can be harder to discern than one might initially assume. Even if a line of historical research and argumentation is concerned with the question in a politically neutral way, the definition of what is and is not capitalist about economic organization immediately betrays political assumptions that cannot be separated practically from method. What we find ourselves mired in is the complicated problem of historical presentation as one of emphasis, where in any account only specific dimensions of an epoch can be called forth. There is a semblance of a totality that always seems within our grasp, but is persistently elusive, as the passage of our own time and the contemporary struggles of the living provoke critical revisitations and reconstructions of our past. With every conjuncture, our vantage point upon the determinations of the present and its past change. Thus, there is never any one definitive account which we can rely upon indefinitely.

It is also the case that every reconstruction is reflective of the conditions which the conjuncture itself requires us to emphasize. The earliest debates after the publication of Marx’s Capital possess a focus on the agrarian question. This can, in part, be attributed to the section of the first volume which deals with the so-called primitive accumulation of capital, its “prehistory” in the violent evictions of English peasantry from the land, establishing a proletariat dispossessed of its means of production and thus reliant upon selling their labor-power for subsistence mediated by market relations. But it is also the case that these debates were in response to the composition of production relations in the capitalist mode of production’s development at the time, where many regions in Europe still had extensive peasantries and underdeveloped agricultural production, especially in the case of Tsarist Russia, where serfdom was abolished in 1861, yet the peasantry remained a significant social class. Furthermore, the tendency of the capitalist mode of production to produce a global proletariat was not yet established on a world scale. This development can be seen more clearly now, as by the early 21st century we now live in an era of globally integrated capitalist industrial production. The phenomenon is then still relatively new, and the initial debates of the origins of the capitalist mode of production litigated through the question of capital’s penetration into agrarian production relations and industrial development indicate a period in which the creation of a proletariat, its relative historical necessity, was not yet a matter of course.

Marx’s work at that time was apprehended, with his approval, by his most lucid readers as a critical study into the specific laws of motion of a society in which the mode of production is based upon the production of capital, by capital. These laws of motion constitute a historically specific dynamic which distinguishes modernity as a capitalist society from all periods which came before, themselves also defined in and through their own specific laws of motion, constituted of and by specific social relations in the material production and reproduction of their subjective and objective conditions of existence. A difficulty then could be present in the ability to discern, as Marx did in the case of capitalist development in England, the extension of these abstractions in the contexts of other early communist or socialist movements. The famed Zasulich correspondence,³ in which the potential of Russian peasant communes as a basis for establishing a socialist mode of production is discussed, attests to the complications that came with the process by which the critique of political economy, intended as a weapon in the class struggle of the proletariat, would be handled in practical terms.

However, the agrarian question would be taken up in more detail in the works of Lenin and Kautsky, and a critical extension of Marx’s theory of so-called primitive accumulation developed by Luxemburg. Against the Narodniks and their vision of a possible basis for socialism in Russia in the peasant commune, Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) asserted that capitalist organization of production in the agrarian countryside, a subsumption of pre-capitalist relations already haven taken hold of the dynamics of Russia’s economy and thus making it a capitalist social formation.⁴ Despite the critique of the Narodniks of this as a teleological interpretation of the transition to socialism, Lenin actually dispensed with these teleological assumptions, and instead emphasized the social form of production given its social division of labor and integration into markets as commodity-determined production.⁵ For Lenin, the stakes of this debate were how to engage class struggle in the Russian context, thus the revolutionaries had to contend with their terrain of struggle as one in which the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production prevailed, despite the prevalence of pre-capitalist relations in certain sectors of production. Supplementing this argument, Kautsky would, in The Agrarian Question (1899), go on to illustrate that the tendency of capitalist development was the subsumption of agricultural production by way of the preservation of small to medium scale farming enterprises, as a means of suppressing prices in a manner which would support the wages that could properly support the expansion of industry. Lenin agreed, stating “as we see, the development of agriculture is quite special, quite different from the development of industrial and trading capital.”⁶ Luxemburg would intervene in these debates, less on the origins of capitalism and its developing penetration, but by way of assessing the dynamics of capitalist reproduction, in which she claimed that the dispossession characteristic of Marx’s theory of primitive or original accumulation actually pertained throughout capital’s process of reproduction.⁷

These constituted pivotal critical interventions and contributions to a Marxist theory of capitalism’s origins, but also within a context of capitalism’s development in which pre-capitalist relations of production appeared to predominate. The actual establishment of the capitalist mode of production, its interpenetration of less-developed forms as a moment of its constitution, is clearly still present in the background of all these debates. It would not be until the post-WWII era that debates among Marxists on the historical origins of capitalism would become a matter to be ascertained as determined centuries ago, even if it had not subsumed the labor process of all social formations. Maurice Dobb’s work in Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946) would counter the Lenin and Kautsky position that capitalism originates in the industrial organization of the towns by asserting an argument of capitalism’s origins in the dissolution of feudal relations in the countryside. For Dobb, capitalism cannot be defined solely by practices of investment and trade, but must be understood as a specific class relation between capitalists and wage laborers, through the prevalence of conditions that would make a class of nascent capitalists increasingly reliant on hired labor. The capital relation becomes intrinsically tied to a specific relation to the land, and the organization of production is a matter of the individual capitals which may form from this. Paul Sweezy’s critique of Dobb promoted a position where the growth of commerce and trade were emphasized as disintegrating influences on feudalism. This spurred numerous critiques which saw several other authors consolidate around Dobb’s position, yet no development of the position which saw a dynamic constitution between these historical epochs, and thus no logical connections between them.

This pitting of production and circulation against each other in the debates on the origins of capitalism appears many times, in varying iterations. This often appears as a dispute over not just the historical development of capitalism, but the very definition of capitalism. By the 1970s, this opposition between production and circulation would reappear in the emergence of World-Systems theory and what would come to be known as the Brenner Debate. According to World Systems Theory, a capitalist world system emerges from the organization of global commodity chains of coerced cash crop labor in a dynamic of surplus extraction to more politically consolidated core states. The impetus of this analysis was to incorporate historically uneven patterns of development into an understanding of capitalism as a system that posits its own global expansion. For proponents such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi, what defined this model as one of capitalist development was the construction of a global division of labor and relations of unequal commodity exchange. Thus, imperialism exists as a dynamic intrinsic to capitalism at its outset. The political incorporation of capitalism into the institutions of the modern state becomes the primary concern. However, what is lost in this analysis is a specificity of capitalist social relations, and what we have instead is a historical model that appears to refract back upon history the geopolitical dynamics of the post-war imperial consolidation of 20th-century capitalism. Within this paradigm, the complex dynamics of colonization and the capitalist organization of pre-capitalist social relations and labor processes as value relations of capital through their reciprocal determinations cannot be accounted for, and neither can internal dynamics of production relations in a labor process subsumed by capital.

Robert Brenner’s historical intervention, the notorious Brenner Debate, would take to task these “circulationist” positions, as well as those of Dobbs, Sweezy, and theories of demographic decline inducing adaptations to the labor process. For Brenner, and for proponents of his position, such as Ellen Meiksins Wood, the primacy of the dynamics of capitalist transition lie in the class struggles of the English countryside, and the relative determination of a balance of class forces conditioned by the class structure of production of the context. The critical importance of Brenner’s position was to combine the economic determinism of debates on the class structures of agrarian production relations with the historical instances of class struggle which demonstrated this transformation as anything but uncontested by the populations it subsumed and subordinated. For a class of proletarians to emerge as wage laborers, the connection of the peasantry to the land must be dissolved. Brenner as well pulls the course of his analysis from an understanding of class struggle and conflict that comes from Marx, though does not follow his critique of political economy to the letter. In his own critique of the World Systems theorists, Brenner demonstrates quite clearly the inability of their thesis of underdevelopment as determinate of capitalism to account for a capitalist dynamic of industrial development to emerge in a tendency to increase productivity. For Brenner, this can only be explained as direct command and domination of surplus labor, and this cannot be solely explained by the growth of trade or commerce.

While Brenner’s position certainly advanced the possibility of determination in political conflict and the crucial dimension of a balance of class forces in this matter, the integration of circulation as a determination in the coherence of capitalism historically is still a crucial element to the mediating forms which nurture the development of capitalist social relations. What we still have in many fields of these historiographic debates is a disposition of alignments with Brenner’s thesis, and various adherents of a World Systems approach, both of which have their own flaws. However, Jairus Banaji’s work has gained greater attention in recent years and constitutes another critical intervention that allows us a more dynamic understanding of capitalism’s origins. Banaji shifts the focus from the English countryside to demand a more global understanding of capitalism’s emergence, but he goes further than the reduction to trade and static conceptions of interstate relations a la World Systems theory, instead looking more closely at commercial capitalism as a form of capitalist production organized by a class of merchants to incorporate a dynamic analysis and critique of Marx’s historical categories and assumptions. For Banaji, Marx’s categories can allow us to pursue a history in which capitalist subsumption is a dynamic process, reconfiguring relations of production in a broad diversity of places. The social constitution of economic forms and the construction of capital’s tendencies in contexts previously considered completely pre-capitalist encourage an analysis of form, content, and mediation in historiographic analysis, as well as closer attention to the relative development of the East in relation to the West’s eventual supremacy. What we have, through Banaji, is an investigation into specific forms of capital in the constitution of capitalism as a distinct reproduction of social relations. István Mészáros also emphasizes the consistency of this concern with Marx’s work as such: “‘Capital’ is a dynamic historical category and the social force to which it corresponds appears — in the form of ‘monetary’, ‘mercantile’ etc. capital — many centuries before the social formation of capitalism as such emerges and consolidates itself. Indeed, Marx is very greatly concerned about grasping the historical specificities of the various forms of capital and their transitions into one another, until eventually industrial capital becomes the dominant force of the social/economic metabolism and objectively defines the classical phase of the capitalist formation.”⁸

Today, Brenner’s and Banaji’s positions are currently expressed as opponents in a debate, curiously one in which they themselves have not yet engaged. The aim of this essay is to posit that while their two positions can be read as in conflict with each other, they need not necessarily be so, and in fact offer complementary dimensions of historical analysis which can grant us a dynamic understanding of capitalism’s emergence not as the result of pure economic determinism or an altogether contingent series of moments, but as the result of a protracted era of class struggle in which social transformation was induced and conditioned by the crises and struggles of the late feudal epoch. Understanding this problem of the emergence of capitalism is intimately tied to concerns of a transition beyond its transience, for what becomes clear is also that the crises of capitalism’s contemporary state is a product of its reproduction of relations of class domination, and not solely an abstraction lording over all, but an abstraction created by practical activity and socially constituted forms of its mediation. To evaluate the works of Robert Brenner and Jairus Banaji, a critical synthesis must be undergone which also grounds the analysis in Marx’s work on both his theory of the value form of capitalist social relations and historical materials on the constitution of these forms.

In handling Marx’s economic categories in historiographic analysis and interpretation, what is most important is the ability to discern the function of these formal categories in the historical movements which constitute the formation of the capitalist mode of production. Rather than comparing historical analysis of the origins of the capitalist mode of production through the identification of these categories historically, we must be rather more precise and able to locate their specific adaptations as forms that function as moments in the capitalist mode of production and its formation. This is a different task and one in which primary historical documentation does not always correspond to the actuality of the process as we are able to discern it, but only long after the moment has passed. Most importantly, the debates over the origins of the capitalist mode of production have as much to do with the definition of “capitalism” of successive interlocutors as it does with historical accounts. At stake in this is our ability to properly historicize our own situation, as we tread a careful balance between the threat of naturalizing capital’s modernity and its social forms across all of human history, or of identifying such a definitive break that we are always lost, searching for the one moment of transformation and continually making that which came before less intelligible as modernity becomes more exceptional.

There exists a tension between the various histories of capitalism and their respective political commitments; historiography is far from a neutral practice. The adherence to Marx’s work as an evaluative measure of understanding the historical emergence of the capitalist mode of production is not because he possesses the “best” or most historically grounded account. It is rather due to the fact that fidelity to Marx’s project is fidelity to a partisan analysis that takes the relatively conscious transformation of social relations and their interrelation to the unconscious imperatives exacted upon agents as its primary concern. The critical study of history must then be less about being more correct and then be about the ability of such accounts to demonstrate to us the dynamics of social transformation of these times and the roles that agents, the interplay between the structural contours of necessity and their motivations, played within them. We are then not here concerned with an overarching economic history, which merely traces movements on the broadest scale possible, as impressive as such a feat may be. Marx does not give us a single historical account of the capitalist mode of production, but rather an analysis of its social forms and the dynamics of their social constitution and reproduction, the historical tendencies and laws of motion of this specific mode of production as a distinct historical epoch, thus its fundamental transience and the means by which its transformation may be effected from within and a new social form can be born from within the old. The importance of the historical specificity of Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production derives from the understanding that people do indeed make their own history, but not always consciously, much less in conditions of their choosing. In order to become conscious agents of social transformation, they must adequately grasp the specific limitations of their own time, and what options are afforded or precluded by these limitations.

In the interest of contributing to this study of the dynamics of social transformation, the focus of this essay will be that of a comparative historiographic analysis of positions on the question of the origins of the capitalist mode of production, and an evaluation of their particular strengths and weaknesses. The works of Robert Brenner and Jairus Banaji are often read in opposition to each other, as conflicting accounts of capitalism’s emergence and the question of a historical period of “transition.” While these accounts differ significantly in their approach and emphases, it is our position that they can be approached critically as complementary dimensions in the project of constructing a Marxist approach to historical analysis. As the most sophisticated popular accounts (among Marxists, at least) of these historical questions, a critique generated by actually placing them in dialogue will be a generative practice. In order to achieve this, this essay will comprise three sections.

First, we will approach Marx’s analysis of the value-form and its relation to the category of abstract labor as the historically specific social form of labor. A dynamic analysis of these economic forms as historical categories in Marx’s analysis, the specific logical relation in the process through which these categories come to be social forms of capitalist relations, is essential to grasp so as to understand what distinguishes the capitalist mode of production from those modes of production which preceded it. This will serve as a foundation for how we evaluate the works of Brenner and Banaji in the following section, where their approaches to the question of European peasantries and the penetration of capitalist social relations into agrarian production will be assessed. There will be a specific focus on the relation of the entrenchment of feudal relations in Eastern Europe to the emergence of a capitalist dynamic of industrial development in England between the 15th and 17th centuries, but this is not for the purpose of pinpointing a single historical or geographic determination for the advent of the capitalist mode of production. It will rather be for the purpose of assessing their respective contributions to the form-determination of capitalist production and its constitutive social relations, and the formation of a capitalist dynamic of reproduction through the historical process of class struggle and its uneven trajectories. The final section will approach this analysis of class struggle and the capitalist mode of production’s origins through the question of commercial capitalism, as a distinct form of production capitalistically organized by merchants, and the state form and its functions as a necessary element of the consolidation of an emergent capitalist class formation. We hope for this to illuminate specific aspects of the determinations rooted in class struggle in the process of formation of the capitalist mode of production, and further that political and economic forms are expressions of value relations as dynamics of a balance of power always in contention with itself, driving this dynamic of capitalist development and expansion. Capitalism cannot be properly apprehended without contending with its continued existence as the reproduction of its social forms by way of adaptations to continued engagements of class struggle, and the state as a social form in which the organization of production is manifest as the organization of class domination.

I. Social Form & History

Marx tells us in volume one of Capital that “nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labor-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history, It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.”⁹ The categorial exposition of the first parts of the work is a logical development of an entirely specific historical process. It is likewise with the categories examined themselves. “The economic categories already discussed similarly bear a historical imprint. Definite historical conditions are involved in the existence of the product as a commodity.”¹⁰ The social form of the product as a commodity implies an entire history of its emergence as such, and so too is it the case with the money form. Value’s specificity as an economic category and form that finds material expression through these formal bearers is essential to capital. Yet we are cautioned on the equivalence of these forms with this mode of their historical operation. “If we go on to consider money, its existence implies that a definite stage in the development of commodity exchange has been reached. The various forms of money (money as the mere equivalent of commodities, money as means of circulation, money as means of payment, money as hoard, or money as world currency) indicate very different levels of the process of social production, according to the extent and relative preponderance of one function or the other. Yet we know by experience that a relatively feeble development of commodity circulation suffices for the creation of all these forms.”¹¹ We learn that exchanges operating with money as a mediator are still in accordance with lesser developed regimes of commodity production and circulation. Already the assumption of the commodity’s immediate existence as indicative of the capitalist mode of production is complicated. Money can serve these functions without becoming a functional form of capital. What is it that distinguishes this mode of production and the social form of capital from that of the money form? He goes on to clarify: “The historical conditions of [capital’s] existence are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. It arises only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence finds the free worker available, on the market, as the seller of his own labor-power. And this one historical pre-condition comprises a world’s history. Capital, therefore, announces from the outset a new epoch in the process of social production.”¹² It is the social relations between people themselves that give these mediating forms their specific functions as forms of capital, specifically, those of the owner of money and means of production on one side, and that of the mere bearer of labor-power on the other. This is a historically given condition, not by the appearance of material expressions of the form itself, but the activity and relations of the agents that comprise its content.

It is then necessary to expound upon the role of Marx’s work in relation to an adequate theory of the emergence of the capitalist mode of production, or, rather, the epoch of capital as a social form constituting the totality of social relations. Capital cannot be read as a work of history, yet its object is essentially historical, in its relation to both its prior development that is a premise of the exposition, as well as the fundamental transience of this mode of production to which Marx aims to draw out as a conclusion of his work. What is at work in Capital is not a history, but rather a demonstration of the conjunctive synchronization of social forms as categories of the capitalist mode of production in their unity as moments of a distinct process, with a specific directional dynamic.

The starting point of the commodity is thus not the basis of a historical investigation, but rather that of an investigation that seeks to reveal the categories of social life as determined by the capitalist mode of production through the logical self-development of these categories at the level of simple, immediate appearance. The apparent self-movement of the commodity reveals a social form of determinate relations that, in reality, grounds and conditions its movement. This ground is not an absolute nature, but an edifice that is constructed historically in the positing and reproduction of this movement, giving it the appearance of a self-movement, and marking it as distinctly conditional. Given this, it is not the objective to merely reveal that the ground of the categories of capital is the social labor of the human species, but that this social labor takes a historically specific form:

“[The commodity] is no longer a table, a house, a piece of yarn or any other useful thing. All its sensuous characteristics are extinguished. Nor is it any longer the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason or the spinner, or of any other particular kind of productive labour. With the disappearance of the useful character of the products of labour, the useful character of the kinds of labour embodied in them also disappears; this in turn entails the disappearance of the different concrete forms of labour. They can no longer be distinguished, but are all together reduced to the same kind of labour, human labour in the abstract.”¹³

This social form of human labor is thus not merely an expression of a concrete unity of the various kinds of concrete labor, but a complex unity which grants these various concrete laborers a definite and distinct social form in their aggregate relation to each other: abstract labor. This category of abstract labor is then revealed as the definite “social substance” of value:

“There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity; they are merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour, i.e. of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure. All these things now tell us is that human labour-power has been expended to produce them, human labour is accumulated in them. As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values – commodity values.”¹⁴

This “substance” of abstract labor is only present through its crystallization, or said another way, in so far as it is capable of assuming a definite form of appearance in which its motion can be guaranteed. To render labor abstract is itself nothing but a presupposition for its appropriation in “congealed quantities” of this “phantom-like objectivity.” Value is then this relation of abstract labor to itself, as a basis for a metabolic process of social production conditioned around the form of the commodity and the development of value as the corresponding abstract form of social wealth. What is most important here, and is most apparent, if yet unsaid, is that Marx’s exposition of these categories bears throughout the precondition of exploitation in their specific role in relation to capital. The category of abstract labor, as the social form of labor in the capitalist mode of production, is one in which human labor enters into a stage of its development, where it is within a given relation of appropriation in which its specific product ceases to be the end goal of the material production of wealth, and rather the articulation of the substance itself is the basis for the formation of value. Value is then a relation of exploitation and one which is conditioned by human labor in the abstract, or abstract labor, as the basis for social mediation. A distinct logic of its organization then emerges:

“However, the labour that forms the substance of value is equal human labour, the expenditure of identical human labour-power. The total labour-power in society, which is manifested in the values of the world of commodities, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour-power, although composed of innumerable individual units of labour-power. Each of these units is the same as any other, to the extent that it has the character of a socially average unit of labour-power and acts as such; i.e. only needs, in order to produce a commodity, the labour time which is necessary on an average, or in other words is socially necessary. Socially necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society.”¹⁵

Labor-power, as manifest in its relation within the values of the world of commodities, is an articulation of this social form. The commodity is the individuated articulation of the social form, whereas labor-power is a commodity that resists individuation through its relation to value as the conditional existence of abstract labor such that it can be made to “create” value. That is, as the commodity is a universal form that transmits itself through the relation of particular iterations of itself to each other, labor-power is the appropriable form of this abstract labor in the form of the commodity. This homogenization of social activity is subsumed within a distinct constellation of relations which comes to articulate the relation of exploitation as one in which the individuated, atomic units of labor-power, through their exploitation, condition a social average of their consumption in the production process of commodities through the temporal axis of labor-time. This socially necessary labor-time acts not as a conscious mechanism in the regulation of production and allocation of labor in the capitalist mode of production, but as a substantive relation between the various sites of production and the social validation which these values receive through their mediation in the act of exchange which realizes their values. The temporal axis of commodity value, as expressed in socially necessary labor-time, is thus the result of this relation of abstract labor to itself within a distinct dynamic motion of its appropriation, as value, and its exploitation, as a labor-time which can be adjusted according to the socially-determined conditions of production, which now emerges as social production in a capitalist form through this constellation of relations in process. This gives rise to a distinct form of social production. As Marx says:

“In a society whose products generally assume the form of commodities, i.e. in a society of commodity producers, this qualitative difference between the useful forms of labour which are carried on independently and privately by individual producers develops into a complex system, a social division of labour.”¹⁶

This social division of labor cannot be apprehended as a simple category specific to the organization of divided tasks on the level of any given community but refers specifically to the organization of social production between the social aggregate of independently expended labor-powers in an atomized organization of social production where producers carry on independently of each other, where their relation to each other only occurs through the self-movement of the commodity in circulation in the world market. This relation is expressed as competition between producers, a dynamic which, as a form of turbulent, indeterminate “regulation,” is a mutually constituted and reciprocally conditioning war of all against all. It is in this crucible that labor times and conditions of production find articulation as “socially necessary.” What is necessary here is that which is deemed necessary by the social validation of exchange in the market, as values are realized. It is necessary then to understand what is at stake in the distinction between the direct exchange of products and the circulation of commodities, which finds expression through an exchange process, for these are distinct moments. As Marx states, “The circulation of commodities differs from the direct exchange of products not only in form, but in its essence.”¹⁷ This essence appears in the money-form of capital which acts as the independent, material expression of value. “It is however precisely this finished form of the world of commodities – the money form – which conceals the social character of private labor and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly.”¹⁸ The adequate expression of this form is to be found in the advent of what Marx terms ‘world money,’ a money relation that exists as the locus within which these relations are expressed in a concentrated unity of their diverse concrete acts of labor as a new universality, capable of expressing the value of all commodities generally. As the material appearance of this particular social form of labor, money that functions as capital consists of a uniquely abstract kind of social wealth, proper to a scale of circulation only possible with generalized commodity production.

“In world trade, commodities develop their value universally. Their independent value-form thus confronts them here too as world money. It is in the world market that money first functions to its full extent as the commodity whose natural form is also the directly social form of realization of human labor in the abstract. Its mode of existence becomes adequate to its concept.”¹⁹

The circulation of commodities and the appropriation of the products of labor as values in the independent and autonomous form of money is thus an expression of an essence peculiar to the capitalist mode of production, one in which human social activity is subsumed into the functional composition of its deployment as abstract labor. This relation is expressed through this money crystal, as a form within the totality of social relations of production constituting the commodity form of the product as a bearer of value. It is thus a form in which the intangible temporal axis of exploitation within which this regime of abstract labor is situated is capable of being appropriated by agents which function as money-holders within this totality, deployed to the expansion of their value in this money-form as a means of continually instantiating abstract labor as a social form.

It can be remembered above, however, that this abstract labor has been described as a “social substance,” a “homogeneous mass,” which would seem to deprive it of the quality required for expansion. This language connoting a concrete materiality would appear at odds with its “phantom-like objectivity” in the form of value. How does an abstraction expand itself? After all, what is capitalism without the endless pursuit of greater and greater profits, of a self-induced need for ever more growth, for the sake of itself? These categories, then, cannot be assumed to possess a static character, but to describe a particular motion in which they are continually constituted by their respective agents within definite relations. With regards to abstract labor, Marx presents us with a clear moment in which its own dynamic motion of reciprocal determinations of form are revealed through the ongoing dialectical constitution of the abstract and the concrete as distinct, yet interpenetrating moments of a single unity in the social form of abstract labor:

“On the one hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power, in the physiological sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or abstract, human labour that it forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power in a particular form and with a definite aim, and it is in this quality of being concrete useful labour that it produces use-values.”²⁰

There is an apparent ambivalence here in Marx’s characterization of abstract labor, one in which we are both granted credence to the physiological interpretation of its being a physical act of expenditure in its expenditure, and one in which its “particular form” is too presented as a distinctive quality, its possession as such of a “definite aim,” an abstract form in its being a socially-constituted form which reaches back into its concrete determination as the producer of use-values through its exploitation. Yet while this physiological interpretation is insufficient alone, and mistakes the result of the social form for its existence itself, the social form is unintelligible without this generalization of human activity which actively constitutes and defines its specific articulation as the formation of capital-as-process. The physicality of human labor is then necessarily understood as a presupposition of the social form’s determination, though it is not identical to it. Thus, in this dialectic of abstract and concrete, abstract labor is a social substance only insofar as this process of subsuming the concrete labors in the totality of social relations of production as human labor in the abstract is continually instantiated by the production and circulation of commodities, through their translation into universally intelligible values in the money-form of their appropriation. Its being as substance, rather, is a process of its becoming-substance, an ongoing substantialization characterized by the subsumption of human social activity as labor within the social form of abstract labor, and thus able to be appropriated as the commodity labor-power.

Money is not always identical with abstract labor, and thus also all exchange is not necessarily the realization of the exchange value of a commodity. For money to be the representation of abstract labor, there exists an entire history of the conditions required for human labor to itself function abstractly. The realization of this condition is in the appropriation of the commodity labor-power, through the emergence of a definite class of laborers whose entire subsistence can only be guaranteed by the sale of this special commodity for a wage. Why is this commodity special, as opposed to all others? Because it is the commodity whose consumption in the production process creates value, the only one of its kind. This “creation” of value, however, is contingent upon the realization of this activity in the social validation of exchange, without which the expenditure of labor in the form of the commodity labor-power by which it is purchased ceases to be socially necessary, and therefore useless. This tension is what characterizes the dynamic mediation of capitalist social relations in the process of capital’s reproduction. We all work for each other, thus labor is social, but we do so indirectly as self-objectifying agents producing our own self-alienation as a means of guaranteeing subsistence in the purchase of the product of others’ labor so that this labor-power is never our own.

This forms the basis for capital’s inherent expansionary tendencies internal to its reproduction, as the accumulation of capital is conditioned by this competitive dynamic between atomized sites of commodity production as this ongoing process of expanding the scale of abstract labor as the subsumption of human capacities within a distinct social form, transforming the labor techniques of the production process as capital encounters it and reconstituting these in the circulation of commodities as sites of commodity production and thus moments in the process of substantialization of abstract labor. This character of the product as a commodity is given by the relations of its very production itself. In this regard, Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism is a central feature in articulating the substantive reality of social form which structures and is structured by the content that appears on the surface, as an ongoing process of mutual transformation:

“Whence, then, arises the enigmatic character of the product of labour, as soon as it assumes the form of a commodity? Clearly, it arises from this form itself. The equality of the kinds of human labour takes on a physical form in the equal objectivity of the products of labour as values; the measure of the expenditure of human labour-power by its duration takes on the form of the magnitude of the value of the products of labour; and finally the relationships between the producers, within which the social characteristics of their labours are manifested, take on the form of a social relation between the products of labour […] [I]t also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time suprasensible or social […] the commodity form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”²¹

There is not a single atom or ounce of additional matter which enters into the constitution of these social relations themselves in order to functionally become expressions and bearers of value. It is rather their arrangement and organization in relation to each other from which is situated the starting-point of their movements of relating to each other as such which constitutes this process that is capital. The very form in which relations of production are constituted is crystallized within the articulation of their product in its being a moment of the process of their relation to each other, as moments in the becoming of social production at a new and historically specific scale of its relation to itself in the history of the social life of class societies. Likewise, it is this very same social form of labor and its position within the totality of social relations of production which gives it an apparent objectivity beyond the producers themselves. “Their own movement within society has for them the form of a movement made by things, and these things, far from being under their control, in fact control them.”²² The self-objectification as the self-expression of producers as the material reproduction of their own conditions of existence undergoes a dialectical inversion in the development of this social form of production and the subordination of labor as an abstract function in its commodity form of labor-power, to be exploited and appropriated in this alienated form as not merely self-objectification, but a process simultaneously self-alienating and self-objectifying, manifesting as the class relation which is capital.

The import of this transformation of social relations of production, according to Marx, becomes apparent when it is situated historically and can be understood as a specific form of production that does not itself hold a transhistorical existence prior to the moment of its social realization. “The categories of bourgeois economics consist precisely of forms of this kind. They are forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social production, i.e. commodity production. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy which surrounds the products of labour, on the basis of commodity production, vanishes therefore as soon as we come to other forms of production.”²³ That is, as soon as we come to approach the matter historically, the capitalist mode of production’s organization of the production process as the subsumption of processes of labor as a totality of valorization can be understood through their development of socially mediating forms that relate agents of production to each other through a reciprocally conditioning social metabolism of mutual exploitation. It is the product of a distinctive historical epoch in history, and one which possesses its own laws of motion and progression.

We are given the first developed articulation of this motion and progression once Marx arrives at “The General Formula for Capital”²⁴ where, in his exposition of the transformation in form between commodity and money which characterizes the self-movement of value, he states:

“Therefore the final result of each separate cycle, in which a purchase and consequent sale are completed, forms of itself the starting-point for a new cycle. The simple circulation of commodities – selling in order to buy – is a means to a final goal which lies outside circulation, namely the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of needs. As against this, the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for the valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is therefore limitless.”²⁵

The entire objective of the capitalist mode of production then is the reproduction of capital as the reproduction of its conditions of existence, and thus the constant expansion of itself through the subsumption of social activity through capital’s positing of itself as limitless. The bind of this unity of apparently separate cycles of the satisfaction of need is merely distinct moments of a unity of process in which social need is integrated within the social constitution of capital’s self-expansion in the process of valorization, taking the process of direct exchange and transforming it into a dual-sided articulation of the reproduction of capital. What marks the advent of the capitalist mode of production as distinct from the historical process of transformation, as described by Marx above, is the distinctive teleological positing of itself that capital induces as the directional dynamic of the society founded upon its production, and one in which temporal and spatial logics come to be subsumed under as well. Capitalist history is the formation of a distinct and spiraling moment of its own reproduction, one in which transformation is a constant feature. Yet it is a transformation that must continually take its subsumption of social activity as a reconfiguration of such within the regime of abstract labor and functionally reconstitute this dynamic as it encounters its own limits. Of the capitalist, we also find a distinct social logic:

“As the conscious bearer [Trager] of this movement, the possessor of money becomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the point from which the money starts, and to which it returns. The objective content of the circulation we have been discussing ­- the valorization of value – is his subjective purpose, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more wealth in the abstract is the sole driving force behind his operations that he functions as a capitalist, i.e. as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will. Use-values must therefore never be treated as the immediate aim of the capitalist; nor must the profit on any single transaction. His aim is rather the unceasing movement of profit-making. This boundless drive for enrichment, this passionate chase after value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser. The ceaseless augmentation of value, which the miser seeks to attain by saving his money from circulation, is achieved by the more acute capitalist by means of throwing his money again and again into circulation.”²⁶

The class relation of capital is capable of accommodating variety. However, as can be observed through any attention to historical detail, the capital relation requires a polarization within which this variety of articulation is constituted in relation to itself as such. These are, namely, a class of money-owners and possessors of the proprietary claims on value. These may exist in a material-physical form as the infrastructures and landed property of the production process, or an abstract-social form as the money-form of value in its universal intelligibility. This value is animated in and by a class of those who can only access these elements of social production and subsistence through their submission to the exploitation of the capitalist class formations by selling their living labor capacity, constituted in its commodity form labor-power, in its purchase that constitutes the mediation that is the wage-relation. These separations are posited by the presupposition which conditions their formation in the organization of social production as determined by the commodity form of the product.

Yet, if we are to understand this history as not a natural, but rather a social, expression of the development of the species as a social being in relation to itself, them this particular class relation, one that is characteristic of the fetish character of relations mediated by the commodity form of social production as appearances of fixed social relations in their moments as crystallizations of process, and the means by which they historically really manifest as “crystallizations,” must be discerned. The fetish of the commodity is the objectivity which these relations appear to possess. That this is an antagonistic social relation driven itself by the class struggle which it induces is not sufficient alone. But is the key to understanding the advent of its realization as a social form. For the accumulation of capital, as Marx illustrates in his work, is not a mere amalgamation of objects in quantifiable expression, but is a specific socially constituted set of conditions that make the reproduction of this dynamic of capitalist production, and thus the materialization of value and its self-expansion as surplus value, possible in a concrete manner. Surplus value is then not an object produced, but an expression of the continuity of this relation itself as an expanded reproduction that latches onto the various forms which constitute its material shell. Likewise, the temporal axis of domination that characterizes the formation of value as a social mediation of exploitation and social law of real appropriation through labor-time as an expression of the manipulation of abstract labor’s substantialization is constituted by the ability to divide the temporality of the working classes into so-called necessary and surplus labor-time, the latter of which being the explicit object of the capitalist’s aims of limitless self-expansion of their capital’s value, and is conditioned by the competitive pressures to maximize its activity. Capital, as a relation, can be adequately described then as the “command over surplus labor,”²⁷ or rather, the command of human activity posited beyond itself in an alienated form of objectivity, and thus a relation which continually constructs itself as the subsumption of that which forms its material limits: the human agents themselves which form the basis for the self-movement of these relations of exploitation.

The categorial exposition of Capital is then not a historical approach to the development of these categories as they are found in the bourgeois science of political economy. Rather it is one that, from the starting-point of the commodity, develops the logical self-movement of the capitalist mode of production through the relation of these categories to each other as a process of the social constitution in which the social forms at play posit their own presuppositions, an enveloping movement back into themselves as moments of this process that is capital’s social relations in motion. The following developments of the “hidden abode of production” proceed from this foundation of the dialectical form-determination of these movements of social constitution, by way of both abstract example and historical record. Capital is thus inseparable from these specific laws of motion that subsume moments of the life process of the species as moments of itself and thus condition the articulation of a distinct temporality within the overall historical existence of social life where the constant transformation and reconstitution of the elements of the process return into a dynamic reiteration of this formal homogeneity.

It is here, however, where the problem of origins comes to the forefront, for if capital is a result of a logical self-development in which class struggle exists as an internal moment that is also conditioned in its expression by the process itself, what is to prevent the development of a naturalized conception of the capitalist mode of production as an objectively necessary stage in the self-development of society? Marx resolves this through the conception of a “primitive” or “original” accumulation of capital, a moment in which the capital relation itself must be enacted in a concrete manner, and in which the commodity labor-power is, in a sense, truly “produced” as a distinct internal object of the capitalist social form.

“In themselves, money and commodities are no more capital than the means of production and subsistence are. They need to be transformed into capital. But this transformation can itself only take place under particular circumstances, which meet together at this point: the confrontation of, and the contact between, two very different kinds of commodity owners; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to valorize the sum of values they have appropriated by buying the labour-power of others; on the other hand, free workers, the sellers of their own labour-power, and therefore the sellers of labour.”²⁸

There exists a necessity of a confrontation between these positions within the social polarity of the capitalist mode of production’s essential class relation, in which their unity can properly constitute the process of valorization in a social form adequate to the concept of capital itself. Capital, commodity, money, and labor-power are here all reciprocally determining presuppositions of each other, though in an absence of a moment of their conjunctive synchronization, do not fulfill the requirements of a valorization process. This moment is one which Marx provides a brief discussion, historically locating it in the dissolution of the feudal epoch. While the above passage paints this encounter as an abstract moment of exchange, we have also learned that the advent of this exchange is the product of an entire history of conditions that make it possible and functional as a capitalist relation. Though its precise unfolding is beyond the scope of Marx’s development of this “original” moment of accumulation, we locate it in a relative condition of this overdetermination of social forms and their presupposed relations to each other:

“Hence the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-labourers appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and it is this aspect of the movement which alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”²⁹

“In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capitalist class in the course of its formation; but this is true above all for those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process. The history of this expropriation assumes different aspects in different countries, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different historical epochs.”³⁰

It is then made clear that this very transformation, this realization of a historically specific epoch in the development of social production, is constituted as a process through this very dispossession. This moment is itself the essence of the accumulation of capital, as also demonstrated earlier by Marx in “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.”³¹ This expropriation is the necessary moment that constitutes the self-movement of capital in the conjunctive synchronization of its elemental categories. Further, expropriation is here given by Marx to be not a single moment, but an integral feature of the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. That it assumes a variable character of intensity and the application of force allows us to interpret Marx’s examples of the enclosures of the English peasantry as not the original accumulation of capital itself, but merely one example in what is an implicitly varied succession in a field of social relations of commodity production and market-mediated circulation which presuppose and posit this very expropriation as an overdetermined condition of the fulfillment of their own reproduction through the self-expanding process of valorization. As a “lever” in the course of the formation of a distinct capitalist class, this very expropriation amounts to a victory that is not merely economic, but political in its concrete determination and in the articulation of its reproduction.

“It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated at one pole of society in the shape of capital, while at the other pole are grouped masses of men who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Nor is it enough that they are compelled to sell themselves voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance. The constant generation of a relative surplus population keeps the law of the supply and demand of labour, and therefore wages, within narrow limits which correspond to capital’s valorization requirements. The silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker. Direct extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases. In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the ‘natural laws of production’, i.e. it is possible to rely on his dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them. It is otherwise during the historical genesis of capitalist production. The rising bourgeoisie needs the power of the state, and uses it to ‘regulate’ wages, i.e. to force them into the limits suitable for making a profit, to lengthen the working day, and to keep the worker himself at his normal level of dependence. This is an essential aspect of so-called primitive accumulation.”³²

The “transition” to capitalism, rather, the historical emergence of this mode of production as a process, is thus not automatic, but requires the consolidated organization of a distinct and emergent class of the rising bourgeoisie to find expression as capitalists through the political force of the state, and, in this social form of the state, control the limits of a social formation’s reproduction such that a working-class comes to be produced, constructed, maintained as an integrated moment as an objective condition of its existence. This is the essential production of a proletariat by capital as a source of surplus labor. The development of the dependence on capital by these distinct class formations is a result of class struggle and is necessarily the outcome of the concrete terrain of political class conflict. The state form is here necessary to the emergence of the capitalist mode of production, and one which cannot be interpreted as an externality to the compulsion of these economic relations but rather a moment of the expression of emergent relations of force between classes that comes into formation through the development of an antagonistic conflict between their respective conditions of existence and the organization of subsistence relations. The antagonisms of this class struggle are preserved and transformed by their reproduction in the social form of capital.

Marx does not provide us with a concrete chronological history of the feudal epochs dissolution. What we have, rather, is, on the one hand, an exposition of the categorial elements of the capitalist mode of production and the manner in which all, as presuppositions of capital, posit it in and through their relations within the conjunctive synchronization of their movement as the process of capital. On the other hand, we have, by way of example, an illustration of the means by which this synchronization of these elements come to exist and function as moments of this process. The very self-movement of capital is a result of the political class struggle, and one in which the bourgeoisie plays a role as the bearers of capital proper, the character-masks of the initial realization of a mode of production that is characterized by a distinct mode of class domination that is achieved politically and conditioned economically, successively reproduced by these mediations as the organization of social production through universalized social relations of exploitation.

Where the so-called transition period presents its greatest problems is in its existence as a moment in the formation of the specific teleological dynamics of capital’s process and the uneasy emergence of this process from within a distinctly pre-capitalist epoch itself. The stakes of any investigation into the transition era require us to properly understand the relationship between the social constitution of these formal determinations that presuppose the concrete realization of capitalist social relations of production as this occurred through the dissolution of the feudal epoch and from within the material shell of that waning age’s political and economic structures and the contours of the political class struggles that animated this transformation of pre-capitalist social life into the society founded upon the capitalist mode of production. This task is nothing short of reconciling a consistent problematic coherence of the unity-in-process, transformation and reconstitution, as real moments of a concrete history made by human agents, but which comes to dominate them. In short, the historical dialectic is not just an abstract model with which we attempt to make sense of this world, but a reality of the contradictory and uneven character of its formation.

II. Class Struggle & Emergent Mediations

The establishment of capitalist social relations and a capitalist dynamic of industrial development, in the context of agrarian production dominated by the serfdom of the feudal epoch, has several key matters of importance. First, the matter of mediating forms of subsistence which are dominated by the wage relation, and not by any direct production of subsistence by the producers, is an essential moment in the ability of money to function as capital through its purchase of labor-power and therefore the constitution of abstract labor as the social form of labor. With producers still capable of some relative capacity for the autonomous determination of the use of their means of production and their product, the capitalist mode of production cannot develop with the appearance of a self-moving dynamic of reproduction. The mediation of social reproduction is not yet wholly integrated within value as an autonomous form of social wealth and regulation of relations of real appropriation.

Second, on the scale of social production beyond the social relations of these immediate agricultural producers, agricultural production is a necessary component to the production of the subsistence of a social formation as a whole, increasingly relevant to the subordination and substantialization of labor as abstract labor as a commercial expansion that brings more and more disparately connected sites of production in relation to and mediated with each other as commodity producers. In order to control the labor of the nascent urban proletariat and developing mediation of the wage relation, the ability to integrate relations of surplus extraction in the serf labor of the countryside became essential to integrating these uneven sites of production into a coherent unity in process.

Third, the organization of feudal estates as sites of production and their adaptation and transformation into sites of commodity production integrated into the mediating infrastructure of commercial expansion, characteristic of these periods, would necessarily have consequences on the political roles and functions of extant state forms. As we are dealing with the instantiation of a historically specific labor regime of abstract labor, we must account for the specific means by which value’s appearance as abstract social objectivity is actively constructed and maintained. Its agency is not that of the form itself, but a dynamic that is politically and economically constituted for those it benefits, as much as it emerges from the appearance of economic necessity for these exploiters, as well as the exploited.

Finally, given the political import of these developments in the organization of production and subsistence relations, the dynamics of feudal “dissolution” must rather be understood as a period of the self-transformation of the extant social relations of production into an emergent dynamic of capitalist reproduction. Within this dynamic, the determinate class struggles over the development of the mediating forms of this totality’s construction are an essential part in the social constitution of a specific relation of its categories and the ability to articulate their conjunctive synchronization as a coherent process of reproduction, and therefore an expression of the realization of a particular dynamic of class domination and relations of exploitation. We come head to head with the problem of being able to coherently discern a moment in which feudalism decisively “ends” and capitalism proper “begins.” It is our contention that there is rather a continuity between the qualitative distinctions of these epochs that are maintained by the same element which constitute the dynamics of its transformation, that is, class struggle. Feudal class domination’s transformation into capitalist domination and its successively impersonal forms necessarily emerged through the preservation of class rule that predates capitalist society, albeit in distinct forms of appearance and execution.

In the interpretation of this historical transformation, we encounter a problem of the capability of clearly periodizing a moment of its initiation, as if the measurements that we deploy onto time are themselves adequate to locate a precise location of such social developments, assuming that they conform neatly to this logic. This forces us to acknowledge that, to a great extent, our ability to cleanly articulate a distinct “feudalism” as it stands in relation to a complete “capitalism” dabbles in abstractions that do not necessarily conform to the contours of historical moments as carefully as one would like, as a means of referring to the specific processes which constitute an epoch’s material and social reproduction. What we do have, however, is a clear passage from an epoch in which a distinct dynamic of development guided by the accumulation of capital and the self-expansion of value emerges from within a definite basis of social relations of production not yet determined by this process. There are many ways in which this pre-capitalist world contained within itself determinations of capital as immanently-posited, yet could only be made as such through the determinate construction and organization of this process as a unity of itself, and ultimately requiring a capacity to not only command labor but to command the surplus labor of the producers within a production process through this unification of capital as the determination of the successive forms of production and circulation.

The so-called passage of history gives us no single account of this self-transformation that is necessarily definitive. What we have available to us are accounts in which the location of the determinant factors in the constitution of this process’ instantiation and realization of itself as a unity, presenting the possibility of capital’s self-developing social totality as a concrete reality. This is not an automatic telos of history, but rather a telos that emerges as the consequence of the determination of specific agents acting within definite relations. Following this, we wish to undergo a comparative study of two of the most developed and currently discussed arguments in the literature on the origins of capitalism, those of Robert Brenner and Jairus Banaji, and appeal to their complementary strengths and dynamism, in order to develop a more adequate theory of Marxist historiography that can aim to satisfactorily synthesize these contributions and understand them on their own terms.

We can see the approaches of both Robert Brenner and Jairus Banaji as articulating to us complementary dimensions of the dynamics of transformation. For Brenner, we are to locate the determinate role of political class struggle and patterns of development given by class structures and social property relations conditioning the viability of making this transformation. For Banaji, the immanent potentiality of the capitalist mode of production is also already given by these structures, but through closer attention to this internally constituted dynamic of positing capitalist social relations that are already apparent in the dynamic of capital as a social form that exists in more antediluvian forms of appearance. The social forms of mediation that emerge from this period of feudal crises, themselves crystallized moments of a dynamic, encapsulate the laws of their epochs. It is our contention that Brenner’s focus on the determination of political class conflict and struggle lacks attention to this process’s own role in the social constitution of the mediating forms which come to articulate the construction of a capitalist social totality as an integrated, complex unity. Banaji’s own dialectic does not fully account for the agentic transformation of these forms of mediation into a specifically capitalist mode of production, and risks imparting upon the entirety of pre-capitalist social relations an inevitability in this economic determination, contra his own questions of the non-inevitability of capitalism. Through a comparative synthesis of their approaches, we can rather demonstrate the necessity of constructing a historical dialectic that understands political class struggle and social forms of mediation as reciprocally determining dimensions of a single process in the material reproduction of social life, interpenetrating movements in the form-determination of capital.

The debate sparked by Robert Brenner’s essay “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe” still yields insight into the role played by extant class structures and the definite composition of social production in the feudal epoch as one in which the development of capitalism was a process of self-transformation. He articulates his position following a critique of the demographic and commercialization theses prevalent at the time of his writing as thus:

“In sum, the contradictions between the development of peasant production and the relations of surplus extraction which defined the class relations of serfdom tended to lead to a crisis of peasant accumulation, of peasant productivity and ultimately of peasant subsistence. This crisis was accompanied by an intensification of the class conflict inherent in the existing structure, but with different outcomes in different places – the breakdown of the old structure or its restrengthening – depending on the balance of forces between the contending classes. Thus in the end the serf-based or feudal class structure opened up certain limited patterns of development, gave rise to certain predictable crises and, especially, tended to the outbreak of certain immanent class conflicts. The element of indeterminacy emerges in relation to the different character and results of these conflicts in different regions. This is not to say that such outcomes were somehow arbitrary, but rather that they tended to be bound up with certain historically specific patterns of the development of the contending agrarian classes and their relative strength in the different European societies: their relative levels of internal solidarity, their self-consciousness and organization, and their general political resources – especially their relationships to the non-agricultural classes (in particular, potential urban class allies) and to the state (in particular, whether or not the state developed as a class-like competitor of the lords for the peasants’ surplus).”³³

Contra the Malthusian theories of demographic decline as a pressure on the pre-industrial labor market and the propositions of commercial expansion as an economic force of compulsion on these pre-capitalist relations that induced their transformation, Brenner presents the determination of the capitalist transformation firmly in the bounds of the balance of class forces within the dynamic of class conflict immanent to the existing class structure of feudal relations of surplus extraction on serfs and peasants. The relative success or failure of any transformation of these sites of production into adequately capitalist social relations of production is dependent upon the ability of these class forces, in and through their direct confrontation in conflict, to preserve their conditions of existence, through either the self-preservation or dissolution of their relations. What Brenner attributes to a relative dynamic guiding this intensification of class struggles is a locally-determinate conception of “historically specific patterns of development” articulating their relative positions to each other. The outcomes are said to be indeterminate but are rather more adequately expressed as the overdetermination of a consequential realization prompted by this primacy on the already existing class structure, the balance of class forces imbued upon this as a dynamic result and precondition of the pattern of development which conditions the structural determinations and in turn is conditioned by the movement of agents within it.

Elsewhere, in his assault on the underdevelopment thesis of the World Systems theorists, he restates the position contra interpretations of capitalist development which place the determination of the emergence of the mode of production proper in the presuppositions of the world market and an international division of labor:

“[…] [T]he origins of capitalist economic development, as it first occurred in England, are to be found in the specific historical processes by which, on the one hand, serfdom was dissolved (thus precluding forceful squeezing as the normal form of surplus extraction) and, on the other, peasant property was short-circuited or undermined (thus opening the way for the accumulation of land, labour and the means of production). Clearly, this two-sided development is inexplicable as the result of ruling-class policy or ruling-class intention, but was the outcome of processes of class formation, rooted in class conflict. Peasant resistance had broken serfdom in Western Europe, in spite of landlord attempts to maintain it. But in Eastern Europe, the landlords prevailed and prevented this outcome. Correlatively, the application of landlord power had forclosed [sic] the emergence of widespread peasant proprietorship following the downfall of serfdom in England. But elsewhere on the continent the peasantry succeeded in gaining the land. It is these contrasting outcomes of processes of class conflict—dependent in turn on contrasting evolutions of class society and disparate balances of class forces at different points in time—which are at the heart of the original transition from feudalism to capitalism, and which require to be understood if the onset of capitalist economic development is to be fully comprehended.”³⁴

In assessing the contributions of Brenner to the question of the origins of capitalism, what is essential is to contextualize the specific matter to which he aims to draw our attention. His thesis aims to locate the origins of patterns of economic development in class structures given by historically specific social-property relations. These structures condition the articulation of class struggle and the political conflict that result, inducing their self-transformation. In this case, once established by the outcomes of class struggles within the parameters of this given terrain of economically-determined political conflict, the dynamic of economic development specific to the capitalist mode of production and its production and exploitation of surplus labor, a dynamic of constant productivity increase and technological development which is distinct from pre-capitalist economic patterns of development and movement, was initiated and able to self-expand. To that end, he is also specifically addressing the question of England’s emergence, between the 15th and 17th centuries, as a localized instance of a capitalist accumulation and pattern of industrial development’s initial appearance in the context of a world economy.

For Brenner, this is the origin of capitalism proper, the first instance of a distinctly capitalist class structure in the constitution of social relations of production. This is leveraged to establish a necessary complication to a thesis of underdevelopment which takes the conditions of the technical process of production in an international division of labor as relations that comprise the labor process, as capital finds them, to be an internal dynamic of capitalist development itself. Brenner’s correction and critique here demonstrates how, to the contrary, the initial moment of relative underdevelopment in the entrenchment of serfdom in Eastern Europe was the result of a feudal impulse carried out by a landlord class capable of maintaining their dominance, and a result of the failure of these conflicts to ameliorate the crises of pre-capitalist relations by means of social transformation. What emerges is a need for a more dynamic understanding of the precise means by which underdevelopment emerges as an internal moment in the reproduction of the totality of the capitalist mode of production that does not mistake the synchronicity of initial appearance for essence. While Brenner does not offer this, he does adequately demonstrate that it cannot be said to be clearly a result of capitalist dynamics, but a condition within the context of its formation.

The actualized possibility of a clearly delineated periodization between feudalism and capitalism is a line that Brenner appears intent on making necessarily evident, though it is complicated by his own assertion of the preservation and intensification of feudal relations elsewhere while they were undergoing a profound transformation in the English and Western European context without being able to make a connection between these instances despite the acknowledgment of the influence of the world market. However, we are given this acknowledgment in a manner that redounds back onto the original thesis:

“[T]he ‘world market’ is unquestionably quite significant. For it was clearly the European demand for English cloth exports which exerted the original pressure for the development of English cloth manufacturing, especially from the later fifteenth century; this, in turn, created demand for agricultural products that induced the English landlords and their capitalist tenants to consolidate holdings and to improve. The indispensable contribution of the world market was thus, typically, to provide the concentrated and continuous demand necessary to induce a transformation toward the application of fixed capital and cooperative labour (especially in agriculture), in the presence of already favourable social-productive or class relations, marked by the dissolution both of serfdom and entrenched peasant property.”³⁵

The economic compulsions of the market are, in the end, for Brenner, not a determinate influence in the realization of capitalist social relations. Yet we are to also hold that the pre-capitalist social relations of production which accommodated this world market, in the English context, were structurally conducive to a transformation into capitalist social relations. Clearly, there is a missing link between the prior determination of these class structures and social relations of production which animated them with their formation as overdetermined eventualities to a self-transformation into capitalist relations. The determinate outcome of political class conflict in their instantiation as capitalist relations remains crucial to the initiation of the dynamic of capital accumulation, yet their overdetermination is not sufficiently accounted for within this paradigm.

Turning to the contributions of Jairus Banaji on the matter, we are given an account of Marx’s critical analysis of mediation and social form, which itself remains crucial to understanding the emergence of the capitalist mode of production within this conjuncture. As Banaji makes clear, to interpret Brenner’s characterization of the English agrarian class structure, demarcated by him in the schematic of the landlord-capitalist tenant farmer-hired wage labor, the specific functions of the agents within this class structure must be examined:

“[H]ired labour functions in this economy as an expression of specifically feudal relations of production, the motive-force of which lies in the social-consumption needs of the owners of the feudal enterprise; it functions in an economy in which the production of commodities is itself only a mediation of consumption.”³⁶

Feudal relations cannot be taken as having undergone a total departure in their transformation, which Brenner would readily admit. But their transformation due to specific economic compulsions of socializing production and the development of capitalist forms of mediation must illustrate the specific way in which capitalist mechanisms of commanding surplus labor come to articulate themselves within the feudal form. What appears here is a new complication; that is, that waged labor alone does not make for capitalist relations of production. As demonstrated above, it is necessary not to mistake the specific forms of exploitation for relations of production, as their equivalence is only the case if taken as separate and undistinguished from their integration into a specific dynamic of reproduction. Contrary to any notion of an inherently transformative character possessed by the growth of hired labor in agricultural production, Banaji also demonstrates to us as well the way in which feudal retrenchment in the Eastern, more peripheral, regions of Europe would come to reflect its most developed and articulated structure of feudal relations, as a question of who in fact controls the labor-process:

“[T]he enterprise only ‘crystallised’, that is, acquired its classical structure, when the ratio of the peasants’ necessary to surplus labour-time was directly reflected in the distribution of arable between demesne and peasant-holding. In other words, the form of organisation of the labour-process specific to the feudal mode of production in its developed form would be one which permitted the lord to assert complete control over the labour-process itself – in which the peasant-holdings assumed the form of, and functioned as, a sector of simple reproduction.”³⁷

“[N]ot only did the crystallisation of feudal relations of production find its only true and widespread expression in the ‘second serfdom’ (i.e. the more backward eastern periphery of Europe); but the feudal estate only crystallised (i.e., acquired its developed, ‘adequate’ form) not in the relative isolation of a Europe cut off from markets and forced to depend on local production, but precisely when the estate itself assumed the character of a commodity-producing enterprise.”³⁸

We have here, in this interesting image of the feudal form’s “crystallization,” a perplexing relationship between this reflection of a relative development of its own immanent tendencies as adequate to itself, and its doing so within the context of a growing world market within which the feudal enterprise is integrated as a site of commodity production. This crystallization here aims to denote this specific development of the lord’s complete control over the labor-process within these examples of the “second serfdom,” through a specific manner in which the tendencies of the feudal forms of production came to most adequately reflect the mode of class domination which characterized its function. There is a critical importance to the emergence of a synchronicity between the distribution of land for the peasantry and its representation in the labor-times that function both for the simple reproduction of the peasantry and the production of a surplus to be extracted by the lord. What we are able to see here is an emergent logic of deployment related to labor that is also the logic of the commodity economy, the emergence of a means of class domination through the temporal domination of the labor process as made immanent by commercial integration. Here its emergence is still reflected in the concrete development of the technical conditions of the labor and production processes as they are encountered, but the temporal division is not a mere abstract instrument imposed as an exteriority but is derived from the combinatory process of the dynamic of real appropriation and the distribution of claims to and working of social property.

Beyond the action of the commodity form as a mediating form of consumption and production, as well as the integration of feudal enterprises into the economic compulsion of the market, is introduced this economic compulsion as an intensification of these relations that solidifies their feudal form. “The ‘market’ and the ‘overexploitation of serf-labour’ were not relatively independent phenomena, or factors which simply ‘interacted’, as both Dobb and Sweezy conceded in their moments of generosity. They were indissolubly linked aspects of a single process, the ‘long duration’ of feudal production.”³⁹ The problem presented by this dynamic of crystallization is that we cannot remove from this era of transformation the simultaneous entrenchment of feudal tendencies with the onset of capitalist social relations and emergent dynamics of capital accumulation. There is no clean, specific moment of transformation, but an emergence from within the material shell of this outward form, as Banaji is intent on demonstrating to us. The socializing influence of the market, as it relates to the socialization of production as it appears in the capitalist mode of production and as capital encounters it initially, must be properly located. It is rather not the mere presence of a market here that makes for any possible overdetermination of capital’s process as self-positing, but the place of this market within a circulation process connecting disparate sites of production and the organization of this unity as a project of class composition. This had uneven effects given the terrain as encountered but created a dynamic of integration which laid an important foundation for transformation within the dynamics of feudal production. Banaji states the importance to the feudal economy of this development:

“[The] adjustment to the market suited both the serf-owners and the importers of grain. It suited the latter because, in the feudal economies, there was no specific limit of exploitation which posited a certain level of prices. The fact that any sale brought a ‘profit’ and the perpetual thirst for such ‘profits’, ensured an abundant supply of grain at low prices. The adjustment suited the serf-owners because the expansion of the market itself implied higher levels of monetised feudal consumption. As feudal consumption inevitably lost its patriarchal character; as the lure of old models of consumption ceased or the civilising influences of an established nobility exerted a pressure of sophistication on the consumption-needs of cruder barbarian aristocracies; and as the monetary share of feudal consumption progressively expanded to a point where ‘internal consumption’ was of scarcely any importance – the thirst for cash became the dominant motive force of feudal production.”⁴⁰

The monetization of subsistence relations is then itself not a determination of the capitalist mode of production, but emerges within the dynamics of feudal production relations and comes to articulate a feudal dynamic of class domination and real appropriation. Yet this is also a clearly important precondition for the basis of value to be represented in the money-form of capital as an autonomous appropriation of abstract labor and its substantialization. The distinction then lies between a feudal form of profit and a capitalist dynamic of profitability tied to the self-expansion of value in the production of surplus value, which would require a more flexible deployment of labor not allotted by the bounded relations of labor characteristic of feudal relations of production. This abstract mode of class domination in the mediating form of the wage relation cannot then be solely attributed to market expansion or monetization of subsistence alone. It must critically be enacted in a process of the self-transformation of these structures which makes concrete what is only immanent within this emergent dynamic. Brenner takes up this critique of market expansion into his own thesis and the crucial emphasis on class struggle as the determinate force of transformation:

“The growth of the market, it is argued, made possible the emergence of a significant layer of large peasants who, through the sale of agricultural surpluses, were able to accumulate large holdings and, on this basis, to amass power and to play a pivotal role in organizing peasant resistance. So the argument for the disintegrating impact of trade on landlord power appears prima facie to be as convincing as the counter-case for its enhancing effects. We are therefore brought back to our point of departure: the need to interpret the significance of changing economic and demographic forces in terms of historically evolved structures of class relations and, especially, differing balances of class power.”⁴¹

Market expansion in the predominance of the feudal enterprise did not produce one single effect of capitalist formations of production enterprises. It did, however, contribute to a specific dynamic of landholdings and potential deployments of labor that would then come to be leveraged in disparate ways to either entrench or transform the dynamics of landlord power and the emergence of a capitalist class position within the feudal form and the modes of domination and relations of exploitation crucial to the organization of production. The critical matter at hand here, for Brenner, is the manner by which the given class structures induced these patterns of development or transformation, determined by the class structures themselves and the balance of class forces that would become apparent through the struggle induced by these intensifications of their constitutive relations. As Banaji notes, this thirst for cash characteristic of the increased monetization of feudal relations of subsistence induced inflationary dynamics in early currency systems within the attempts to expand production still given by feudal dynamics of expansion.

“Under the pressure of successive inflationary conjunctures of this type, a new and distinct phase of feudal production would begin, a phase of crystallisation, with demesne-arable expanding by incursions into fallow, forests, pasture and grazing land. At low and generally static levels of productivity, output was limited mainly by the extent of arable in cultivation; and the expansion of arable required a proportionate expansion of the disposable mass of labour-time.”⁴²

Feudal crystallization is not a static moment, but a dynamic of motion within which the socializing pressure of a successful integration of production and circulation emerges in the organization of production by the feudal estate and the lord. A distinct process of transformation is induced here given the class structures of landed property relations and the dynamic of real appropriation determined by these class structures, as opposed to the dynamic of expansion we see in the more urban examples of labor markets in merchant-organized manufacturing nascent in capitalistically organized production. The constriction on the possibility of feudal self-transformation in this specific environment of intensifying competition induced by the economic compulsion of production and circulation’s successive integration as processes of capitalist reproduction is demonstrated by Brenner, stating that “[…] freeing the peasantry posed a threat to urban controls over the labour market and invited increased competition.”⁴³

Thus a fragmented terrain of class conflict over the determinations of economic expansion folds into a political struggle over these determinations of the control of the labor market. The command of surplus labor itself, as the internally constitutive project of the capitalist dynamic of reproduction and goal of capitalist political conquest, emerges from the successive forms of mediation that grow to structure this in the social form of abstract labor. The constitution of capitalist social relations of production is themselves made internal to the conflicts and means to integrate these destabilizing moments within the feudal form itself. What we must determine within this moment of a dynamic of both the entrenchment and the self-transformation of feudal class structures and tendencies of its laws of motion is the specific characterization of the transformation on the scale of the totality of social production shaped by capital, and which would here, in turn, come to shape capital itself. A lengthy passage from Banaji is necessary here to illustrate this crystallization more completely, as coming to structure a historical moment of intense criticality, the palpable verge of a transformation in a stagnation not characterized by a stalling out of the movement, but rather its intensification beyond its own limits, which would come to necessitate the active construction of a new threshold of reproduction and expansion:

“Within the framework of this classical feudal economy with its specifically feudal organisation of the labour-process, the basic obsession of estate-management remained as before the adjustment of rates of income to rates of consumption, but now magnified on the larger scale of a more labile monetary consumption. Where consumption had retained its patriarchal character, the rate of feudal income would have fluctuated sharply from one year to the next because the level of technique was never sufficiently high to dominate and control the stochastic cycle of production. To overcome potentially vast disproportions, the productive capacity of the undeveloped patriarchal estate would have been organised to ensure outputs above the level of current (internal) consumption. Once the circulation of money impinged on the organisation of this patriarchal economy, the curve of the new monetised feudal consumption would show a slow upward trend punctuated by short spasms of expansion with every fall in currency-values. But with income dependent on commercial surpluses and computed as the product of price and output, the inverse movements of these variables such as characterised feudal conditions would tend to average out the rate of revenue from year to year. As the rate of productivity tended to constancy, prices were given exogenously and rates of consumption were inflexible downwards, the estate could respond to this growing crisis of profitability by heavy borrowings, by the liquidation of assets, or by increasing the volume of output, hence the surface in production and the mass of available labour-time. Yet each of these responses expressed tendencies of feudal disintegration, and the later they supervened in the long cycle of feudal-commodity economy, the more sharply were these tendencies revealed. When the consumption of the serfs already oscillated around a level of simple reproduction, that is, when the classical form of the feudal enterprise had already crystallised, every new drive to ‘maximise sales’ – that is, to push the level of serf-consumption below the existing limits of simple reproduction – would in the longer run radically shorten the periodicity of the old crises of subsistence and aggravate their intensity; it would thus depress the rate of reproduction of the serf-population to one degree or another. The progressive indebtedness and bankruptcy of the lords, the liquidation and ever increasing mobility of feudal property (comprising, as one of its elements, the serf-population itself), the compulsion to expand the volume of output or to expand the field of feudal colonisation and the ever greater frequency of short-term subsistence-crises were basic long run tendencies of feudal production, the necessary expression of its specific laws of motion, present to one degree or another in all sectors of the feudal world.”⁴⁴

In this demonstration of the deepening subsistence crises of that which constitutes the late feudal periods, the increasing velocity of these cyclical crises reveal the most apparent manifestation of the long-form trends of feudal production. The successive inflationary conjunctures that resulted from the gradual monetization of subsistence consumption, first of feudal lords and estate proprietors, then of the serfs tied to patriarchally organized units of subsistence production, became hallmarks of the late-period decline of this “mode of production” as it became increasingly necessary to the linkages of trade networks and thus came to function as a site of commodity production. Capital presupposes a world market, and here its historical fluctuations began to align pressures on converging and contradictory factors of the rates of productivity of the mixed-servile labor force characteristic of feudal economies tending toward constancy, and the manner in which this simple-reproduction of the laborer, relatively fixed to a hybridized landed subsistence and monetized consumption, kept rates of consumption fairly inflexible to depress beyond a dispossession of its landed basis. This dynamic, the accelerating indebtedness of feudal lords, the shifting terrain of feudal property in expansionary drives for greater arable land in order to increase output, the depression of serf population’s reproduction, all became more consistently apparent in the shortening periodicity of their cyclical crises, each moment of crisis presenting ever clearer and more profound crystallizations of this feudal mode of production’s specific laws, all present as long term trends prior, now gaining greater clarity at the exact historical moment in which they begin to become untenable.

Not only are we here given a detailed overview of these dynamics of the feudal economy’s simultaneous disintegration and crystallization into its proper form. Banaji simultaneously illustrates the immanent overcoming within the feudal form a working-itself-out of the immanent dynamics of self-transformation into production founded upon capital, induced by the constitution from within its own dynamics of the social forms of mediation which come to allow for feudal expansion to crystallize while also continually accelerating and intensifying its arrival at its own limits. The conjunctive synchronization of capital’s categories must, in the final instance, be actively organized, but they are crucially made from within the attempts to successively stave off subsistence crises of feudal relations at the limits of the capacity for this form to resolve these crises itself. The material reproduction of social life involves the successive erosion and transformation of itself through these successive engagements with its own objective conditions of existence, yet this social metabolism comes most clearly into definite form at these very thresholds of transformation, wherein their possibilities for continuity are most threatened and the internal conflicts that have merely only been deferred in their intensity come to drive the dynamic of transformation more forcefully than before. The limit and its transgression are both internally consistent moments of the form itself.

We then come back to the specific question which Brenner seeks to answer, which is, in this epoch of intensification and stagnation, perpetually on the verge of an internal transformation poised to constitute a new, immanently-posited dynamic out of the sheer necessity of its disintegration-in-motion: why did England emerge as the site of this first instance of a dynamic of capitalist development of industrialization? Addressing this era of crisis, he states:

“What proved, therefore, most significant for English agricultural development was the particularly productive use of the agricultural surplus promoted by the special character of its rural class relations – in particular, the displacement of the traditionally antagonistic relationship in which landlord squeezing undermined tenant initiative, by an emergent landlord/tenant symbiosis which brought mutual co-operation in investment and improvement […] England remained largely exempt from the “general economic crisis of the seventeenth century” which sooner or later struck most of the continent. This crisis, much like the previous “general economic crisis of the fourteenth century”, was in the last analysis a crisis of agricultural production, resulting as had its predecessor from the maintenance of relationships of property or surplus extraction which prevented advances in productivity. By contrast, it was the transformation of the agrarian class structure which had taken place over the period since the later fourteenth century that allowed England to increase substantially its agricultural productivity and thus to avoid a repetition of the previous crisis.”⁴⁵

This “mutual co-operation in investment and improvement” is a reflection of the English agrarian class structure’s ability to more successfully integrate production and circulation within itself, to form a dynamic in which productivity increase was not directly tied to the feudal dynamic of ongoing arable colonization, but could be applied directly to the labor force itself, and introduce a more flexible deployment of labor through the temporal domination of the worker by the emergence of a capitalistic class of tenant farmers as the active expansion of the wage-relation’s mediation and constitution of labor-power as a commodity. The ability of the English system’s relative ability to avoid the crisis of mainland Europe is thus intrinsically related to this class structure’s self-transformation into a capitalist dynamic, and in the reciprocal transformation of the social form of wealth into a means not tied to the same intrinsic crises of the concrete form of the product, but through the commodity as the social form of value and value as the social form of wealth represented in all products as commodities.

What then appears to occur is a sublation of these historical epochs, one in which the transformation is not so much a revolution in the sense of a complete upheaval, but a series of ruptures coming to reconstitute the preservation of extant forms of class domination through their transformation into more adaptable and dynamic forms of relations of surplus extraction as a new, historically specific, labor regime. “Thus what distinguished the English industrial development of the early modern period was its continuous character, its ability to sustain itself and to provide its own self-perpetuating dynamic.”⁴⁶ The social constitution of this dynamic within the material shell of its preceding epoch conditions the dynamic of class struggle, and its arrival is dependent on the determinate outcome of this struggle itself, in the realm of the relative ability of specific classes formed through this struggle and its antagonisms to assert transformed relations of production through the balance of class forces as an active process of attaining a position in and through this conflict.

What comes to be revealed to us in this necessity of confrontation and conflict in the formal determination of the capitalist mode of production through its immanent emergence is that necessity is not solely the result of a “superabundance of contingencies” in a criticality of subsistence crises, but an intrinsic element of class struggle. Necessity is a partisan concern of classes and their relative balance of forces and a matter of political struggle. What is determined as necessary, what constitutes and determines the contours of social need, is a historical matter and not uniform within the boundaries of all class societies and relations of surplus extraction and exploitation. This appearance of necessity and the question of its relation to the emergence of the capitalist mode of production is then one in which the balance of forces between classes engaged in this struggle plays a central role in the course of its definition. Capitalism then only becomes “necessary” insofar as it reflects the political triumph of a transformed and newly dominant bloc of class power and its means of domination. It is in and through this dynamic of transformation and reconstitution that capitalism not only comes to emerge and become established. But it also comes to transform the process of historical reflection and our own capacity to ascertain its origins in the forms of social mediation that precede and constitute the delineations of this transformation, such as the ability to identify a “feudalism” prior to the foundations of capitalist modernity, but only after its dissolution. The complexity of this problem is readily apparent, though it forms the essential means by which we interpret history and compare historiography. Banaji confronts this problematic by demonstrating the immanent self-positing of the essence of the capitalist mode of production from within the strictures of the feudal commodity economy as such.:

“[W]ithin the limits of [the capitalist’s] control, continually re-established on the basis of various coercive forms of exploitation, the relations of production which tie the enterprise of small-commodity producers to capital are already relations of capitalist production. Between the market and the small producer, capital intervenes with the determinate forms and specific functions of both merchant and industrial capital (as in the slave-plantations, two radically distinct ‘determinate forms’ merge). In this process, two enterprises are thus present, a quasi-mercantile capitalist enterprise, which figures solely as a unit of production (as defined earlier) without the labour-process specific to its mode of production; and an enterprise of formally independent small producers functioning according to its own labour-process, inherited from the conditions of a patriarchal economy, and according to its own economic conceptions, also patriarchal in their determination, but no longer as a totally independent unit of production. The social process of production incorporating the immediate labour-process of the small-peasant enterprise is governed by the aims of capitalist production; namely, by the compulsion to produce surplus-value. Within this social process of production dominated by the capitalist enterprise, the economic conceptions of the small households, and their formal possession of a portion of the means of subsistence, enter as regulating elements only as a function of the law of surplus-value production.”⁴⁷

Already within the commodity form, its temporal compression and spatial expansion of social productive powers, forged in the mediation of circulation across isolated extremities of social production, was this pressure that would realize itself in England as a complete system of the production of capitalist social relations with an internal dynamism capable of articulating a distinctly capitalist logic of development, and, moreover, one which would be intrinsically related to the movement and relative strength of state formation. It would be made into a specifically capitalist sociality through the expanding networks of commercial capital and its administration through financial regimes, guaranteed through the integrated power of dominion in the modern state form. This spatio-temporal separation and unity-in-process characteristic of capitalist production posit and unite its separation within capital through this dynamic of productivity and its impulse to constantly improve upon the conditions of productivity. The exploitation of labor-power as commodity, form-determined by the commodity as the mediator of capitalist social life’s reproductive metabolism, posits surplus labor through this concrete division in the modes of social practice that constitute commodity production and trade. This internally transformative dynamic conditioned by the feudal subsistence crises, and made real as successive transformations of the social forms mediating these extremities, already constitute functions of a law of surplus value production. The immanent is made apparent upon its realization.

This procession can be articulated in a linear fashion, but is not realized as such in actual practice. For labor-power to have become intelligible and appropriable as such, human labor must be rendered into a form of general substance, as abstract labor, in a self-identification with the money form as a mediation of its reproduction, given by the generalization and enforcement of the wage relation. If this is developed as a substance through the progressively expanding and self-integrating networks of commercialism and trade, it is evident that abstract labor became a social form for the deployment of human labor in early industrial works well before this particular emergence of the commodity labor-power, yet in a less contiguous connection to the money form. How is it that this complete commodification does not originate earlier and simultaneously? It is not a state directly apprehended by conscious arbiters of this process within the historical frame at play. Beyond the matter of consciousness, it is also the restive character of these populations of peasants and earlier, pre-capitalist proletarians, and the undeveloped character of state formations and their mechanisms of controlling the problem of populations and the urban concentrations of money holders, and their connection to the organization of production which allows their money to function as capital.

It is then the case that abstract labor can be understood as an immanent possibility according to specific historico-geographic intensities, and liable to shifting this intensity in space and time as commercial networks developed. But the stagnation of various pre-capitalist industrial models in Europe and the Mediterranean world at large was incapable of developing and realizing this possibility in full. Abstract labor, then, is not mere substance, but a state which must be constantly substantialized as a condition of its fulfillment and the subsequent appropriation of labor-power as commodity. The relatively undeveloped character of capital accumulation and state formation in certain regards then cannot be reduced merely to the concrete state of the production processes, or the exact quality of their social relations and extant class structures, but the degree to which abstract labor’s substantialization was capable of being successfully administered in a continual fashion. It is thus then a matter of the global field of capital’s development, encompassing the whole of the Mediterranean-Atlantic sphere of developing capital complexes and centers of accumulation, as well as, and perhaps most crucially, the advanced development of the former, in the colonial expansion, plantation production and extractive industries across the Atlantic, buttressed by the infrastructure of exploitation forged by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and indigenous expropriation and enslavement.

The coherence of social form and class struggle cannot be relegated to an automatic process of capital’s self-movement alone. The self-expansion of value in the capitalist mode of production as a social totality acquires power over the agents within it yet is still carried out by the actions of agents within determined and definite relations of production. In response to specific limitations conditioned by the dynamics of capitalist reproduction and the conjunctures in which class struggles occur within its movement, constitutive forms of class domination and exploitation must be instantiated once more, a burden from which capital is never free, and one it inherits from the social reproduction which precedes it and comes to impart its essential moments upon it. To this end, the question of the consolidation of class relations into an organized deployment of force is central to not only the reproduction of capitalism today, but also to the interpretation of its historical origins. The state form, as the site of this political unity of dominant class formations and tasked with the means and functions of articulating the mode of production itself, thus comes into historical consideration in a theory of transition through confrontation and the active construction and maintenance of capital.

III. Of Merchants & State

Considering the state form and its role in the emergence of the capitalist mode of production constitutes another dimension of the problems of periodization that arise from contested historiographies of the epoch that elide feudalism and capitalism. In the above section, our primary concern was with the emergence of capitalist social relations of production within peasantries and agrarian production, the dynamics which would come to articulate abstract labor as a value relation from a complete separation of producers from subsistence production. The state plays a major role in this dispossession and the organization of the means of force, but this power of the state form and its activity as an agent of capitalist class interests entails a more complex history of historical forms of capital and the capitalist organization of production prior to the agrarian transformation and dynamics of capitalist development. The role of the state carries across these historiographic interpretations but is often subordinated to the debate over specific forms of capitalism and their identification. This is most frequently articulated as the contention over commercial and industrial capitalism. The former is a mode of commercial activity and monetary accumulation of capital that relied largely on the expansion of trade and financial networks with a labor process only formally subsumed, and thus not fully transformed, by capital, and the latter considered the form of capitalism as most thoroughly explored by Marx’s work: a mode of production fully in accordance with the logic of capital, reproducing its social relations through the transformation of all laborers into wage-laborers. In his own assessment of the dynamics between the many debates over commercial and industrial capitalism, Jairus Banaji assesses the terrain in this manner:

“The general implication of these critiques is that we need a model of commercial capitalism that allows for the reintegration of production and circulation, so that one is no longer fixated on the idea that merchant-capital is always and inherently external to production. For this to be possible, we have to see Marx’s definition of commercial capital as specific to the framework of his analysis of industrial capital, and construct a circuit of commercial capital that would explain the movement of the kinds of capital exemplified by the Dutch and English East India Companies, for example. They dominated world trade for a period of centuries and brought about the kind of capitalist world economy that large-scale industry took for granted when it began its own expansion in the nineteenth century. But, when these joint-stock companies were formed on the eve of the seventeenth century, they in turn built on the legacies of earlier and possibly less internationalised forms of merchant capitalism whose origins lie in Europe around the twelfth century, and elsewhere – in the Islamic world and China – even earlier. As a broad periodisation, I would suggest that we see the twelfth to fifteenth centuries as the period of the growth of capitalism in Europe (‘Mediterranean capitalism’) and the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries as the period of Company-capitalism, marked by more brutal methods of accumulation and competition.”⁴⁸

Banaji identifies here an error in the conception of mercantile capitalism as external to the production process, and calls for a historical approach which can identify within the history of merchant’s capital a subordination of the production process such that the control of circulation regimes corresponds to a means of not only controlling the labor-process, but doing so as a valorization process positing and regulated by the law of surplus-value production. Merchant’s capital thus yields surplus value, but only as the organizer of production. The deployment of Marx’s own conception of commercial capital as a circuit in service of an integration of industrial capital is not appropriate to analyze commercial capitalism as it is organized prior to the form of industrial capitalism that is the focus of Marx’s work. Yet what this now makes necessary is the ability of the historical interpreter to identify the operation of surplus value as a condition and moment of the production process, a guiding force of compulsion between the sinews of industry drawn closer together in time, and dissipated and fragmented in space. The task of identifying and interpreting the emergence of surplus value as a law of production introduces the question of surplus labor time, the command and appropriation of surplus labor, front and center. Any satisfactory location of the production of surplus value requires that we observe abstract labor to be conducive to the temporal compression afforded by labor-power as the appropriated commodity, and a dynamic of expansion contingent upon this particularly flexible labor regime.

This formation of capital-as-process as it relates to commercial capital, as a predecessor and presupposition of industrial capital, requires us to examine the capitalistic organization of production processes, as performed by merchants in the aforementioned “Mediterranean capitalism” and the more prominent role of mercantilism as a state project promoting the organization of trade as well as industrial development in “Company-capitalism.” Examining these dimensions as they appear in the works of Jairus Banaji and Robert Brenner, we can discern the critical role of the state form as a consolidation of class power, and a nexus of capitalist transformation through the political struggles, both inter-state and internal to particular states, that would come to fuse the foundation of the state to the accumulation of capital. Within these historical moments we may see as well the necessity of the national capital complex as a mediating form of class domination and capital accumulation, but only by way of examples offered here. A more systematic and comprehensive approach will still be required. Yet despite the absence of this, we may still identify here a dynamic process of labor’s subsumption, one in which the formation of surplus value, the temporal determinations of its constitution through the exploitation of surplus labor time, is developed through the means to do so in both absolute and relative terms as needed. The temporal distinctions in subsumption can by no means be understood as historical chronology, but rather methods in the development of exploitation that can map onto the degree of capitalist development.

The earliest forms of this dynamic subsumption of labor can be found in the organization of production through an extensive world market within a world still dominated by what can be referred to here as pre-capitalist relations of production. What appears here as a conflict in historical interpretation and investigation is the various ways in which capitalist relations of production emerge in a differentiated and distinct manner within and alongside feudal or pre-capitalist political formations. This is often brought to rest on interpreting these relations of production as a synonymous expression with the form of exploitation in which they are expressed. However, as Jairus Banaji reminds us, “relations of production are not reducible to given forms of exploitation of labour,” and thus we must disaggregate these elements of a historical analysis of modes of production.⁴⁹ In this case, what appears in capitalism proper as the clearly delineable category of ‘relations of production’ is muddled, severed from the underlying dynamic which grounds it in capitalism, and surfacing only at the margins of the pre-capitalist world, even if such margins may appear quite developed and form a kind of local center. Different forms of exploitation may coexist as constellations in a given mode of reproduction, aggregated additively rather than constitutively, related only contingently as distinct phenomena rather than appearances of a common essence. Yet it is not simply the class relation, but the class relation within a specific articulation of process which distinguishes capital from the pre-capitalist iterations of similar forms of these relations. With this said, the challenge of identifying and properly interpreting the assembly of this process in concrete terms requires us to locate the moments within this epoch of transformation in which we see the construction of the capital relation within the origination and formalization of this process of capital’s integration of formal categories within itself as functions, modalities in the reproduction of abstract labor and the self-expansion of value in and through the repetition of this process.

The example which is often cited most frequently as the first form of an organization of production which bears a specifically capitalist subordination of labor and appropriation of value is the so-called “putting-out” system, or Verlagssystem, a mode by which work was contracted out by a central agent, most often merchants and merchant companies, to sub-contractors in domestic and urban settings. Much of this system can be characterized as an early form of merchant-manufacture, in which the merchant classes which advanced the materials to producer sites were primarily involved in the organization of the production process itself.

“The Verlagssystem was the dominant organisational form of early capitalism, and characterised by an almost exclusive predominance of circulating capital, severe competition between capitalists, domestically dispersed labour, and the sustained use of piece-rates. It was almost certainly as widespread in the Islamic world as it became in Europe.”⁵⁰

“Thus, in the textile industries ‘putting-out’ was hardly ever a stand-alone system, but was usually integrated into total production processes characterized by their ‘combined’ nature […] Next to monopoly of the raw materials (wool of different qualities, dyestus, alum), integration of control over all these separate processes was the true basis of the merchant’s dominance in capitalistically organized domestic industries.”⁵¹

All too often, the merchant-organized dimension of these organizations of production tends to be interpreted to eclipse their classification as a modality of capitalist production. However, the case may be made that what we are still dealing with here is the distinction between an emergence of a capitalist form of the production process, through the form of the product as a commodity through the mediation of circulation, the means of remunerating the exploitation of labor-power and thus instantiating abstract labor, as a consolidated articulation of the capitalist mode of production proper, though not necessarily established as the basis for all social relations and their mediation. This itself may still be an artificial distinction which evades the central concern here, which is an identification of a form of the production process that established a means of developing, in practice, the conjunctive synchronization of capital’s categories, yet still requiring the organization proper to develop the infrastructure through which value becomes self-expanding in and through the relation of abstract labor to itself. Aside from a detailed investigation into the development of the putting-out system, we can observe what is possible in this ability to constitute abstract labor by way of descriptions of its implementation and effects, its consequence for the disruption of pre-capitalist labor and relations of production. In Braudel we find some specific examples:

“Almost everywhere (where it can be observed) this industry was of a capitalist nature, conforming to the familiar pattern of the Verlaggsystem (the domestic or putting-out system): the merchant, the entrepreneur, or Verleger, puts out to the artisan the material to be worked on for a salary […] Wherever it was introduced it struck a blow against the guilds, the Italian arti, the Spanish gremios. Wherever it was introduced it benefited the merchant class which financed the slow production process and kept the profits from sales and exports.”⁵²

The introduction of the putting-out system then can be shown to be both an example of merchants organizing production in a capitalist fashion, through the introduction of a mediation of labor in a production process where both their means of production and the product of labor are entirely alien property of the merchant to the laborer, and of an emergent class of wage-laborers appearing in their functional exploitation within this system. Yet, importantly, this had little to account for the full subsumption of labor within the totality of relations and does not appear to introduce a distinctly capitalist pattern of industrial development and expansion on its own. The reproduction of the system relies heavily on the organization of the merchants, as distinct from a fully developed industrial capitalism, where the subsumed working class becomes an integrated moment in the reproduction of the totality through its complete reliance upon the wage relation. What is significant here, however, is the emergence of a merchant class actively involved in and reliant upon monetary accumulation as an early form of capital, though still actively a class only insofar as this activity was successfully achieved, and, quite importantly, still as a disruptive element not entirely allied with the interests of other dominant class formations. The relation of merchants to the state can then be seen as a historically necessary element of the success of any of these initiatives of merchant’s capital to achieve successful commercial expansion and consolidation of forces. This is not the introduction of some external element, but leads to an insight into the exact nature of the state form as is illustrated by these centuries in which a capitalist class and mode of production were still only emergent in disjunctive moments. Banaji, through reading Marx’s historical material on merchant’s capital, puts the matter as such:

“[…] there is nothing inevitable about capitalism and […] its emergence depends, crucially, not just on markets but on the state or at least a particular kind of state that sets out to encourage and bolster commercial expansion. Marx himself was quite clear that in the later middle ages both Venice and Genoa were ruled by powerful merchant interests. He referred to their merchants as ‘the most prominent people in those states’ and described them as ‘subordinating the state more securely to themselves.’ In other words, these were medieval states directly ruled by capitalist interests.’”⁵³

The medieval states referred to here would be those of the absolutist state form, the monarch as absolute sovereign within a centralized structure of political authority. Yet to view these political forms as indicative of a pre-capitalist medieval era is to equate state form with the mode of production, and to erroneously seek a clean break between historical epochs. In fact, as Banaji states, the revolutionary character of merchant classes “were in the forefront of economic innovations, embodying a modernity which is best described as purely capitalist. Apart from bills of exchange and other financial devices and modern ways of organizing business that were innovated in the later middle ages, the chief expression of this mercantile modernism was a minute knowledge of international markets.”⁵⁴ Following the immanent telos of capital-as-process which follows from the merchant-organized accumulation regimes that integrated production and circulation into themselves, the absolutist state form becomes apparent as an early modern type state. Its function, as Poulantzas would go on to state, was “precisely not to operate within the limits fixed by an already given mode of production, but to produce not-yet-given relations of production (i.e. capitalist relations) and to put an end to feudal relations of production: its function is to transform and to fix the limits of the mode of production.”⁵⁵ This binding of the state to capital, however, is not uniform across the board for this epoch. The competitive dynamics of merchants, the constant warfare between states, the hemispheric divide of East and West in the Mediterranean manifest as a transformed medieval struggle between Islam and Christendom, yet modernized for this era of commercial expansion, all indicate a period of profound instability, the shifting axes of economic power an indicator of such.

Much of Banaji’s work challenges the established historiographic notions of the origins of capitalism by deploying these analyses of merchant class formation and the demonstration of an operational law of surplus value production. This is in order to demonstrate a sophisticated financial and commercial network in regions where capitalist industrialization did not set in but were nonetheless quite active in constructing the economic social totality which would engender a dynamic subsumption of production sites as commodity producers through this fusion of production and circulation, the setting of antediluvian forms of capital as mere social forms into a process and logic of social wealth. This shift in attention in his work is often called to the Eastern origins of commercial capitalism, most notably in the oft-forgotten role of the Islamic world in constructing these financial infrastructures. The question remains, however, as to the emergence of a more developed capitalist dynamic of industrialization in the West, particularly in England, versus in the Ottoman Empire at the time. The sophistication of Islamic political formations can be evidenced by Banaji’s survey of the intellectual development of political economy by Ibn Khaldun, as early as the 14th century:

“The political economy that frames much of this history can be described as a symbiosis between tributary Muslim states and commercial capital. Ibn Khaldun saw this very clearly when in the Muqaddimah he wrote: ‘wealth as a rule comes from their business and commercial activities,’ referring to political regimes throughout the history of Islam down to his time. The kind of commerce he had in mind was substantial, large-scale, capitalist trade. He says in the Muqaddimah, ‘Commerce means the attempt to earn a living by expanding your capital and the extent by which capital is increased is called profit.’ Labor, he wrote, ‘is the essential basis of all profit and accumulation of capital.’ Taking both ideas together it followed that the most prosperous or developed states were those with abundant supplies of labor available to those who could make commercial use of it. ‘A large civilization yields large profits because of the large amount of (available) labor, which is the cause of (profit).’ […] To [Khaldun] the most developed states (in Europe, the Far East, and Islam) were those where capital had access to large reserves of labor and which, crucially, did not treat the owners of capital unjustly. When they did, they triggered a dynamic that usually led to their own downfall. Ibn Khaldun notes in passing that state officials and rulers were usually jealous of the capitalists, implying that there was always a strong temptation to overtax the commercial sector or even move in and monopolize some leading sector, as the Mamluk Sultan Barsbay did with the Egyptian sugar industry.”⁵⁶

There is here an early iteration of the labor theory of value, a prelude to the development of political economy in the West, though one that would not see nearly as systematic a treatment until the 18th century. What Banaji brings out here in Khaldun is the explicit connection between capital’s success not only by way of the successful exploitation of labor, but through an effective relation of capital to the state. It is one described here where the state and capital’s cooperation are intrinsically tied to the command of its laboring population. This is an early indicator of an articulated theory of successful strategies of accumulation as ones where the interests of the state must be joined with those of the capitalists, a deviation from this always at danger of triggering a dynamic of internal conflict and decline. This fusion of state and capital does play out in a localized manner in the Islamic world in this period, as Banaji continues:

“Within the countries of Islam, large-scale commerce was driven by the concentration of demand in major metropolitan markets that also happened to be the seat of government and the base of some major ruling dynasty. In the Abbasid period Baghdad epitomized a market of this sort and was unrivaled anywhere in the world for the sheer concentration of wealth and commercial activity […] the great geographies that were written between the ninth and early thirteenth centuries show that the true heart of the system lay at a lower level, in smaller, commercially active centers like Basra, Nishapur, Bahnasa, Mahdia, Sfax, Palermo, and Almeria and the vibrant networks they formed. They were the true backbone of the economy. Both state and private capital invested majorly in the commercial infrastructures known as funduqs (more correctly, fanadiq), khans, qaysariyyas, or wikalas, solid stone buildings that were square or oblong and opened on to the street ‘by means of a single, often monumental gate’ or (in the case of qaysariyyas) as many as six to eight gates. Cities like Cairo in the sixteenth century were dense concentrations of commercial capital, and the wikalas and khans were where the bulk of wholesale trade took place, commercial establishments that Labib could even describe as ‘virtual stock exchanges.’”⁵⁷

The proliferation of concentrations of capital in important commercial centers that were also political centers is not a coincidence, but an expression of an important element to the successful accumulation of capital: the organization of capitalists as a class and the consolidation of their political and economic power. This aspect of the history of the capitalist mode of production’s formation is essential, and one conditioned by the emergent competitive dynamics in the social form of production as commodity production, the commercial means of mediating the subsumption of labor within this emergent totality of social relations as abstract labor through the unity of production and circulation, the active construction of value relations and the class organization that could ensure the viability of financial infrastructures to adequately mediate these extremities. However, if this was the case in Islamic centers in such a sophisticated fashion, how are we to account for the success of the West in becoming the epicenter of modern capital accumulation and industrialization? Banaji articulates an important distinction:

“[…] the non-development of capitalism was less about a failure to emerge than about the failure to acquire a more collective, corporate form that could express and contribute to the solidarity of a class. Capitalists certainly existed in the Muslim world, but they failed to form the kind of collective solidarity implied in the notion of a ‘class.’ […] It is a striking fact that there was never any Islamic counterpart of the West’s violent mercantilist expansion. Again, the decisive factor here is the very different ways in which commercial capital and the state were bound to each other. The powerful state backing that English merchants received from the monarchy, what Brenner calls the ‘Crown-company partnership,’ had absolutely no equivalent among the numerous dynasties that, like the Ottomans, were willing to encourage trade but unwilling (or incapable) of the kind of aggressive expansion that the Portuguese monarchy unleashed in the opening years of the sixteenth century. Of course, once the European powers embarked on their expansion into Asian markets, Islamic commercial networks were a prime target across the whole region.”⁵⁸

The expansionary efforts of merchants and absolutist state forms in the West severely outmaneuvered those of the Ottomans, and further bolstered these expansionary thrusts, via colonial ventures and commercial competition, in order to subordinate Islamic trade and commerce to their own interests. Calling forth one of Braudel’s most critical insights to this era of commercial capitalism, Banaji says “if, as Braudel claims, ‘Capitalism only triumphs when it becomes identified with the state, when it is the state,’ then the externality of the state to capital remained the chief limitation on Islamic capitalism and its transformative potential.”⁵⁹ State power cannot remain an autonomous arbiter to capital accumulation, entrenched in antediluvian social relations, but in fact must become subsumed by capitalists and subordinated to their control if the expansionary dynamics of surplus value production are to be reproduced. The capitalist mode of production only announces its complete arrival once it has conquered the obstacle of class organization as a function of class domination.

As merchant classes would prove a crucial development in the formation of capital-as-process through the integration of production and circulation, the competitive dynamics of commodity production and circulation would come to necessitate stronger expressions of capitalist power through the successive organization of consolidated class interests, and this manifested historically through the relationships of merchant classes and company partnerships with the centralized political authorities that formed as buttresses to the instability of this transformative epoch. It is not enough that a class exists in potential, as class is not a social relation autonomous from the movement of the material reproduction of a definite form of social life within which its existence is historically and geographically situated. For a capitalist class to ensure its reproduction, it must continue to entrench this position within the strategic centers of power given by the totality of the ensemble of social relations.

This, however, demonstrates a further complication to this history of capitalist class formation and dominance. As they revolutionize the society within which they assert their social class power, merchants do not remain the sole flag-bearers of capitalist modernity. To understand this dynamic, we may pick up on the reference to the work of Robert Brenner which Banaji cites here as an example of a more successfully competitive fusion of state and capital. In his book Merchants & Revolution, Brenner constructs a detailed history of commercial expansion in England from the 16th to 17th centuries, tracing the contours of sociopolitical conflict that comprised this era of commercial expansion and state transformation, to give an account of the English Civil War (1642-1651), its conflict between Parliamentarians and Royalists, as a product of the capitalist transformation of social relations in English agricultural production that produced a landed capitalist aristocracy and the fragmentation of merchant class interests which would come to not sufficiently ensure Royal support.

In articulating this relationship between the monarchy and merchant class, Brenner writes that “throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the merchants of London secured their profits as much through collective political initiative and organization as through individual economic enterprise. In almost every case, they founded their trades on government privileges that provided the basis for monopoly companies and the close regulation of commerce. Trade by a government-chartered, regulated company was the long-established norm in England. And it had a good and sufficient rationale in the complementary needs of the larger overseas merchants and the monarchy.”⁶⁰

The relation to individual capitals and their relative success was tied intrinsically to the capacity of merchants to act as an organized political force, retaining and refining their relationships to the monarchy. State tax policies, internalized infrastructures of force and their legitimization were important costs for merchants to externalize, and their doing so successfully guaranteed the monarchy its own privileges of stature and wealth from these commercial expansions. “The merchants thus sought government-backed monopolies in order to restrict trade to members of their companies and to bar those who were not exclusively overseas traders. On this basis, they sought to regulate the shipments of the company traders, with the goal of manipulating markets for purchases as well as for sales.”⁶¹ “The overall trend throughout the pre-Civil War period — especially when the Crown and merchant community could cooperate without interference from Parliament — was thus toward rising levies on trade and greater protection for the merchants’ companies.”⁶² Any notion of an organically generated capitalism, or its development from sheer abstract compulsion, is cleanly disputed by the active construction of markets as a political venture as much as an economic one.

In this era of capitalist transformation in England, the Civil War is seen by Brenner to be a conflict that comes as the expression of determinate political class struggle as the mode by which the transformation of the state form would necessarily be enacted. The problem of capitalist class organization can then be seen as central to this conflict, but not as an already given, unified capitalist class. This fusion of state and capital sees, in the English example, a fractional composition of capitalist class interests between these commercial and industrial forms of capitalism, their ideological contestations and practical concerns expressions of their relations to production and thus, most crucially, the command of surplus labor as a function of surplus value production.

“[…] it would be my own point of departure that capitalism developed in England from the end of the medieval period by means of the self-transformation of the old structure, specifically the self-transformation of the landed classes. As a result, the rise of capitalism took place within the shell of landlord property and thus, in the long run, not in contradiction with and to the detriment of, but rather to the benefit of the landed aristocracy […] the ‘commercial classes,’ far from uniformly capitalist or ideologically unified, were divided from, and indeed in crucial ways set against, one another in consequence of their diverse relationships to production, property, and the state […] it [then] becomes possible […] to begin to understand the differing political and religious outlooks of the major sociopolitical actors […] as, in crucial respects, responsive to their differing relationships to capitalist development and its effects — or, more precisely, to the new forms of social property relations and the new form of state that were the product of the transition to capitalism.”⁶³

In detailing the dynamic internal to the development of a landed capitalist aristocracy, Brenner’s above theses on the dispossession of the peasantry and the emergence of a capitalist tenant farmer class that encouraged the accumulation of wealth within the English national context aligns this supremacy of economic power to the development of a dynamic of agricultural improvement and the productivity of labor, essential to the foundation of basis of political power capable of disrupting the merchant-Royalist alignment:

“What the transition from feudalism to capitalism on the land thus essentially amounted to was the transformation of the dominant class from one whose members depended economically, in the last analysis, on their juridical powers and their direct exercise of force over and against a peasantry that possessed its means of subsistence, into a dominant class whose members, having ceded direct access to the means of coercion, depended economically merely on their absolute ownership of landed property and contractual relations with free, market-dependent commercial tenants (who increasingly hired wageworkers), defended by a state that had come to monopolize force […] The lords did succeed during the subsequent era in securing absolute property in their landed estates, in part against the claims of the customary tenantry, in part by maintaining broad demesnes as an inheritance from the medieval period. They thereby gained the ability to take commercial and competitive, not merely customary and fixed, rents from their tenants, and were able to take advantage not only of the rising food and land prices that marked most of the early modern period, but also of the growing competition in the land and product markets among their commercial farmer-tenants. The result of the latter change was increasing social differentiation […] and significant agricultural improvement, leading to the growth of agricultural productivity. Because of their self-transformation — partly imposed on them, partly implemented by them — the greater landed classes thus succeeded in accumulating their great wealth and social power directly on the foundations of capitalist property and capitalist development.”⁶⁴

Landed classes would come to form a distinct force from the emergent capitalist farmers that arose as intermediaries to the organization of production and the direct task of subordinating labor. Yet while these forces were immanent to the possible rupture of the monarchy, and certainly asserted a basis for capitalist class power that was new to economic development, the consolidation of the state was still capable of, however briefly, mediating these interests. The demands of the state would change in relation to the needed security of property relations, a reflection of the revolutionization of the relations to the production process, and this would come to determine the character of the political conflict over the state to follow.

“No longer needing to possess what was in effect a piece of the state, be it a lordship or an office, to maintain themselves economically, what the greater landed classes of England now merely required was a state able to protect for them their absolute private property…They therefore associated themselves ever more closely during the early modern period with the monarchy in the construction of an increasingly powerful and precociously unified state that succeeded, by the early seventeenth century, in securing (at least in formal terms) a monopoly over the legitimate use of force […] extraordinarily effective in guaranteeing landed-class property.”⁶⁵

This characteristic of the transformation of the English state form, a developing dynamic reconstitution of state power that appeared in a political dimension of contestation for supremacy between the monarchy and emergent social forces with their own basis for the production of value, demanded a political realization through the ability to control mechanisms of state power in Parliamentary bodies, and is thus an example of both capitalist subsumption of the social formation’s reproduction and the dynamic integrations of process and function which characterize this period of state formation. Statecraft appears the sole project of the designers of modernity, a creation of the world in their own image, yet the limits of power make this instrumental capability extremely conditional, subject to all sorts of reaction and transgressions of itself. The dominance of the monarchical state-form, a medieval social form that still retained some exapted functional use in the total social trajectories of capitalist development throughout Europe, served the nascent English bourgeoisies, mercantile, agrarian, etc, as a guarantor body of the constitution of private property, a right which acted as the regulator of the appropriation of forms of material wealth absent an internal dynamic unity which could guarantee a lordly class this function, in accordance with its self-reproduction. The feudal period is characterized by this particular requirement of enforced unity. In the capitalist seizure of the state form and the constitution of a distinct logic of capitalist development, the functions of the state form could shift to a consolidated focus on the development and deployment of the juridico-political means of force that maintained this internal coherence of capitalist social relations of production.

What emerges prior to the upheaval which sought the active transformation of the state form were adaptations which, in effect, made this state more effective to the functions that would be demanded by capitalist interests:

“[…] the unification of the state by the early seventeenth century left the monarchy in an unprecedented position vis-a-vis the landed class […] the state had vastly increased its effectiveness by improving its administration, extending its activity into many new spheres, and accruing massive new, especially landed, wealth in the hands of the monarch. Yet the monarchy continued effectively to control this much more powerful and much more unified state, for it maintained, as a legacy from the medieval period, considerable financial and administrative resources of its own and the right to appoint most major governmental officers […] Monarchs were no mere executives, but great patrimonial lords […] virtually inseparable from the state […] inherited political (prerogative) rights to economic resources sufficient to maintain themselves and to constitute their own political following […]”⁶⁶

This consolidated state form would then reduce some of the pressures exacted upon it prior by landed classes, as their own relations and functions would change:

“[…] [T]he transformation of the aristocrats into successful capitalist landlords had not only relieved them of the need for a state consisting of locally based associated lordships or estates to dominate the peasants directly; it had also very much restricted the potential for the construction of an absolutist tax/office state — by limiting the landlords’ need for office as a source of income and by restricting the amount of landed property that could be taxed without directly confronting the landlord class […] the English monarchy had […] only limited independent sources of income and a restricted patrimonial following of dependents […] the landlord class retained significant leverage over state finance […]”⁶⁷

We can see here the reciprocal foundation between state and capital emerge through the security of relatively autonomous political power by landed classes in their control over finance, but also relieved the state of accommodating them within its own body by the construction of local offices. An early divergence here of the political and the economic directly manifests as an emergent division of labor amongst the dominant classes in the fusion of state and capital. Addressing the impulse to assign this dynamic to Europe as a whole, Brenner differentiates this transformation of the class structure and its relation to the state, and in doing so demonstrates how this transformation in England would constitute a dynamic internal to the state where conflict would be let in through its attempt to accommodate the transformative forces into its own functions.

“Despite superficial similarities, the English landed class’s political interests must therefore be sharply distinguished from those of the truly locally focused dominant classes of northeastern Europe, to which they have sometimes been misleadingly compared. Local landed proprietors initially looked to a more effective national monarchical state, of which county government was an integral part, to defend their property from peasants and neo-feudal magnates. But they also closely identified their own interests with the growth of the power of the monarchy and the state in a whole series of other crucial areas […] the greater landed classes had to favor a stronger government that could more effectively regulate the social economy […] Since the prices to be paid for agricultural products, as well as the security of the social order in the face of commercio-industrial fluctuations thus depended, to an important degree, on the health of the cloth industry, landlords had little choice but to interest themselves in government policy to regulate cloth production and cloth commerce, and especially in the state’s actual capacity to make and enforce such policy […] government regulation of dynamic nascent manufactures produced for a growing domestic market […] Parliament should not be viewed merely as a guarantor of the local landlords’ property and their position in the state; it served as a central means for the effective collaboration of those local proprietors with the patrimonial monarchy in operating the state and in governing the country.”⁶⁸

The dynamics of industry introduced by the merchant and monarchy fusion of state and capital inaugurated a competitive dynamic of transformation through the self-transformation of agricultural production and productivity, in turn bolstering the landed classes as organizers of a domestic labor force and domestic market, and thus conditioning a transformation in the state form in its functions of securing class organization. However, the dynamics of competition and fractional class interests, most importantly the differential in domestically-situated economic power between these landed class formations and merchant relations to production would provoke still further conflict, as the monarchy would attempt to hold onto power while the functions of the state were becoming more operational in the hands of the emergent capitalist formations. A new question would come to emerge, that of “who was to control the state and for what ends.”⁶⁹ This consolidation of politico-administrative functions within the state in combination with the formation of landed capitalist class formations as a nationally-based foundation for capital accumulation conditioned “the emergence of what was […] a very new problem, both structural and constitutional. To limit, to defend against, or to make use of the state, which had ceased to be subject to fissure into its constituent parts, could no longer be achieved through the restrengthening of local or particularist powers and privileges; it had to be accomplished by taking control of it as a whole.”⁷⁰ The English Civil War and its eventual culmination into the briefly-lived Commonwealth government came to articulate the expression of economic development as the political class struggle for the means by which capitalist interests came to articulate themselves in a national form through the transformation and expropriation of the state.

Landed property itself acts as a precursor to the aristocratic landlords that would become the bedrock of a purely national capitalist class formation in England. Pre-capitalist modes of appropriation and relations of exploitation were not transformed at a moment, but resolved themselves into the formation of “free” labor in relation to the bounded relation to landed property, as the fusion of the product of this land’s cultivation and the tandem exploitation of human and natural resources underwent a dynamic fusion into the transformed form of social wealth as an abstract value, appropriated in money form. The separation of labor from its own means of realizing itself had already to be separated in order for the bind to be completely wrenched from the hands of the direct producers. Commercial processes of expansion and the influx of offshore commodity trades formed the basis for this relation, a moment that only begins as the encounter of an exteriority in appearance, to be realized as an internal relation through the consequence of its adoption as a resolution to the crises of subsistence that plagued the attempted intensification of exploitation of extant feudal relations.

The state form is thus a crucial category of any theory of the emergence of the capitalist mode of production and in any historical exposition of the transition to capitalism. The political and the economic diverge in their historical apprehension as distinctive regions of an emergent mode of production based on a social division of labor produced by emergent social relations of commodity production. The advent of the realization of labor’s self-alienation through the process of its own material reproduction through the exploitation of labor-power is a process where the political constitution of capital accumulation plays an integral role in developing the conditions by which a foundation of its autonomous and relatively automatic reproduction can cohere as a specific dynamic of social production subsumed under the reproduction of capital and the relational content of its formal coherence through the paradigm of value.

As the nexus of social relations and their movement as determinate class struggle, the state form is the political articulation mediating these struggles in its appearance as a process conscious of itself, and in turn becomes a fetish appearance of struggle when conducted in isolation of its economic determinations. Commodity production lays the foundation for this particular social form of the modern state, as evidenced by its necessity as a site of capitalist class unification, itself as violent as the dispossession upon which it is founded. It is the crystallized moment of the social reproduction of definite social relations of the material production of the social formation as an active project, one that represents itself as an aggregate of institutional apparatuses of political, economic and juridical functions which represent distinct moments of a structural composition of the ensemble of social relations in their antagonistic movement with and against each other, generated by the foundation of the capital relation and value as a formal and regulatory principle. In the historical emergence of capitalism, the state form of various territorial formations of capital plays a critical role, one that clearly can demonstrate the fallacious claims of any historical epoch of supposedly “laissez faire” capitalism where freedom saw its fullest expression through the unbounded rationality of market maneuvers of expansion and social organization.

The state form has always been a pivotal site where the implicit class relations of social relations of production are articulated as definite class relations. This operates, however, not explicitly, through the official declarations of the state, but implicitly through the juridico-political mediations of the formalization of process, as observed in the means by which law serves as a space where contradiction is carefully addressed through the establishment of precedent. There is no direct acknowledgment of a distinctive mode of production that is itself historically specific and thus transient to be found in the word of law, but a formal articulation of the policing and maintenance of the boundaries of process, articulated by this process itself in its social constitution through class struggle. As the political organizer of the interests of the dominant class elements, state juridical mediations leverage legality and its construction as a means of reproducing the particular demands of capital accumulation within a given conjuncture. As the primary disorganizer of the subordinated classes, the juridical functions of the state form mediate the uneven and hierarchical relations of political power amongst classes through the construction of the legal citizen as a blanket subjectivity through which every subject engages the law through the claim of right. This introduces a critical function of isolation as a condition to be continually imposed, not merely as an abstract domination, but a continuous self-alienation of the species in the project of the constant reconstitution of abstract labor, refracted through the lens of the dominant juridico-political infrastructure and ideology, guaranteed through the requisite means of enforcing this relation upon these “equal” subjects.

Historically, the state cannot be interpreted as an entirely autonomous and self-subsisting body of social activity apart from the economic basis by which this constitutive activity shapes its institutional formations. Likewise, the state form must not be too understated through this apprehension of its coherence as a moment of the totality of capital’s processes of constitution, reproduction, and transformation. The characteristic fetishization of capitalist social relations, a result of the historical climax of labor’s self-alienation through the material distinction between private property and the formation of the commodity labor-power, refracts through the prism of social life subsumed to the reproduction of itself as value relations in many distinct ways. It is the quality of social relations as moments of a process, mediated through the commodity form of value through which their crystallizations appear, which imbues these various functional moments as separations constituting this unity of fragments in process, that constitutes the phenomenon of fetishization. In a way, the state form and its appearance as the purest articulator of social agency is the paramount example of the fetish construct, through which the impossibility of surmounting historically specific social relations is integrated into the ideological region which mediates the atomistic subjectivities of class struggle into constant restructurations and rearticulations of the same structural antagonism. Class struggle is both an immanent motive force of capitalist development, through this subsumption of human activity, and the means by which the capital relation’s supersession is posited, in the crises opened up by the discontinuities initiated through this struggle.

Conclusion

Class struggle itself proceeds unevenly, and is not a determinate unfolding in the sense of realizing an already articulated social form, but is itself the process of social constitution of the ensemble of social relations, necessarily uneven and disparate, which are brought into relation with each other through growing social productive powers within definite relations of production, themselves within definite historico-geographic constraints of their practical realization. The capitalist “transition” can only be understood as the outcome of protracted class struggles and sociopolitical conflicts, themselves determined by the exhaustion of feudal relations wrought by extensive subsistence crises and the deterioration of medieval and feudal political systems’ capabilities of subordinating the contingent adaptations of economic life which arose from these crises themselves. Commercial capital conditioned the social form of the product as the commodity, becoming a mediating abstraction capable of subsuming within it and fundamentally transforming the qualitative specificities of surplus product that remained limited in the strict adherence to a determination in their concrete forms. Abstraction grows from the impasse of a concrete unity’s ability to continue to define itself and guarantee a stable motion of the reproduction of material life. As the commodity form is conditioned by the process that mediates it and it is mediated by, so it becomes the element of form-determination in its articulation of the concrete shape of the production process itself, the very rendering of the production process as the autonomous sphere of the production of commodities. However, this abstract schema cannot be mistaken for a coherent logic that develops instantaneously, but comes to being through the necessities imposed by the limits defined by these struggles.

The immanent transformation of extant class structures must be emphasized. The emergence of capitalism as a mode of production, in and through the formation of capital as a mode of production via a social form of relating the products of human labor as an abstract basis for equivalency, via the extensive and expanding trade networks of the world of commodities, their subsequent representation and appropriation as values through their integration with the money form, and the renewal of the accumulation cycle of this autonomous form of value, was not an implantation of an external logic conceived a priori of the historical conditions of social life encountered by these emergent phenomena. The logic of capitalist development is not the prior construction, but the immanent separations that come to constitute the dynamic trajectory of capital accumulation and the subsumption of the labor process. The elision of the feudal and capitalist eras is not a transition of production processes themselves possessing a complete coherence in this epoch, but a coinciding of intensified social antagonisms present throughout the pre-capitalist era. The “transition” itself a product itself of the eventual contestations that would come to be most decisive in temporarily bringing resolution to these crises.

This demonstrates to us that any historiography of the emergence of the capitalist epoch must go further than identifying an original instantiation of a complete articulation of capitalist production and account for the dynamics of capital’s historical existence as a socially constituted form and the specific organization of the production process as the production of capital. To understand these, it is essential not to view feudalism and capitalism as cleanly delineated epochs, nor as mutually coherent modes of production unto themselves, but specific epochs that share historical proximity in the constitution of capitalism’s social transformation. What once was will not be reconstructed, nor would it be desirable to do so. Furthermore, its modes of class domination and relations of exploitation informed and conditioned the development of capitalist social relations, and thus a clean break from the old form is rather an appearance which results from the intensified acceleration of transformation that specific conjunctures may induce but not altogether break from the same temporal continuity. Ruptures are, after all, reconstitutions of continuity.

Returning to the conversation from Q which introduced this essay, the millenarian connotations of the dissolution of a historical epoch feel impossible to avoid. What our friend Eloi reminds us, however, is important: “The Apocalypse isn’t an objective to be sought, it’s all around us […] if you want to change the world of men you’ve got to live in it.”⁷¹ Echoing Banaji’s complex dynamic of crystallization in intensifying feudal crises, it is a rather similar situation with the capitalist mode of production in the present conjuncture, itself molded and shaped by decades of deepening crises and ever-longer periods of recovery (if a full recovery is possible at all). The waning guarantees of reproduction for capital and its increasingly restive subjects of exploitation and abjection allow us, in the contemporary moment and its immediate history, a crystallization of capitalist production’s own laws of motion, a rapid temporal compression of its long-form tendencies, its dissolutions and the unrest fomented by them the wrecked prospects of a mutually-conditioned reproduction of contending classes, which necessarily finds itself taking place on the world stage. Abstract laws are not present, ready at hand, from any given point in history, but the velocity of crisis allows us to see a social form at its most pure; for capitalism, it is the blind lashing out of accumulation absent its material foundations of expansion, the increasing rapidity of these motions rising from a bare hum that could only be heard in the distant peripheries decades ago into a fever pitch of such frequency that its content appears rendered still in form, apprehended in an audible tone for all to hear, the abstract laws of motion as equally present and intangible as a suspended tone resonating in still air.

We may be reminded of the ways in which “Omnia sunt communia” rang out from the pre-capitalist revolts of the peasants, the knowledge of a life in common as an objective centuries before the modern communist movement first articulated itself. There is a moment in Capital in which Marx sees this same immanent possibility, the historical obstacle to capitalism’s transience as continually given and reasserted by capital itself. It is no sooner that capitalists emerge and engage in competition that they begin to devour each other, an eternal cannibalism intrinsic to the dynamic reproduction of the social form’s own metabolism. From within this, and the class struggle which has given it and continually shaped it, the nature of capital’s supersession is given:

“This expropriation is accomplished through the action of the immanent laws of capitalist production itself, through the centralization of capitals. One capitalist always strikes down many others. Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by a few, other developments take place on an ever-increasing scale, such as the growth of the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the planned exploitation of the soil, the transformation of the means of labour into forms in which they can only be used in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and, with this, the growth of the international character of the capitalist regime. Along with the constant decrease in the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”⁷²

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1. Blissett, Luther. Q (2003) [2000] pp. 412-3
2. We owe these quotes and their attributions to an excellent article by Tim Barker, which can be found at https://phenomenalworld.org/reviews/commercial-capitalism in which he reviews Jairus Banaji’s A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism (2020), a book we will be dealing with in more depth below.
3. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/index.htm
4. Lenin (1977) p. 217. “Capital is a certain relation between people, a relation which remains the same whether the categories under comparison are at a higher or a lower level of development.”
5. Ibid, p. 192. “No Marxist has argued anywhere that there ‘must be’ capitalism in Russia ‘because’ there was capitalism in the West, and so on […] No Marxist has regarded Marx’s theory as some universally compulsory philosophical scheme of history, as anything more than an explanation of a particular social-economic formation.”
6. Ibid, Vol. 4 p. 144
7. Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (1951) [1913], p. 358. “In general, capitalist production has hitherto been confined mainly to the countries in the temperate zone, whilst it made comparatively little progress in the East, for instance, and the South. Thus, if it were dependent exclusively on elements of production obtainable within such narrow limits, its present level and indeed its development in general would have been impossible. From the very beginning, the forms and laws of capitalist production aim to comprise the entire globe as a store of productive forces. Capital, impelled to appropriate productive forces for purposes of exploitation, ransacks the whole world, it procures its means of production from all corners of the earth, seizing them, if necessary by force, from all levels of civilisation and from all forms of society. The problem of the material elements of capitalist accumulation, far from being solved by the material form of the surplus value that has been produced, takes on quite a different aspect. It becomes necessary for capital progressively to dispose ever more fully of the whole globe, to acquire an unlimited choice of means of production, with regard to both quality and quantity, so as to find productive employment for the surplus value it has realised.”
8. Mészáros, Beyond Capital (1995) p. 938
9. Marx, Capital, Volume I. 1976 [1867], p. 273
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid, pp. 273-4
12. Ibid, p. 274.
13. Ibid, p. 128. Emphasis added.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid, p. 129
16. Ibid, p. 133
17. Ibid, p. 207
18. Ibid, pp. 168-9
19. Ibid, pp. 240-1
20. Ibid, p. 137
21. Ibid, pp. 164-5
22. Ibid, pp. 167-8
23. Ibid, p. 169
24. Ibid, ch. 4
25. Ibid, p. 253
26. Ibid, pp. 254-5
27. Ibid, p. 672. “Capital, therefore, is not only the command over labour, as Adam Smith thought. It is essentially the command over unpaid labor. All surplus-value, whatever particular form (profit, interest, or rent) it may subsequently crystallize into, is in substance the materialization of unpaid labor-time. The secret of the self-valorization of capital resolves itself into the fact that it has at its disposal a definite quantity of the unpaid labor of other people.”
28. Ibid, p. 874
29. Ibid, p. 875
30. Ibid, p. 876, Emphasis added.
31. Ibid, p. 798. “The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour. The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws, it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here.” While distinct from the historical expropriation of so-called primitive accumulation, the reproduction of the proletariat as a class of dispossessed sellers of labor-power is demonstrated here as the essential movement of capital.
32. Ibid, pp. 899-900. Emphasis added.
33. Brenner, R. The Brenner Debate (1985) [1976], p. 36.
34. Brenner The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism, New Left Review I,104 [1977], p. 78.
35. Ibid, p. 76
36. Banaji Theory As History (2010), p. 93. Emphasis in original.
37. Ibid, p. 74
38. Ibid, p. 84
39. Ibid, p. 88
40. Ibid.
41. Brenner 1976, p. 38
42. Banaji 2010, p. 89-90
43. Brenner 1976, p. 39
44. Banaji 2010, pp. 90-1
45. Brenner 1976, pp. 51-52
46. Ibid, p. 53
47. Banaji 2010, pp. 97-98. Emphasis Banaji’s.
48. Banaji 2010, pp. 257-8. Emphasis added.
49. Ibid, p. 353
50. Ibid, p. 275
51. Banaji 2020, p. 91
52. Braudel, F. The Mediterranean Volume I (1995), p. 431
53. Banaji 2020, p. 120
54. Ibid, p. 121
55. Poulantzas, N. Political Power and Social Classes (1973) pp. 160-1. While deploying Poulantzas’ characterization of the absolutist state in its context here, we wish to make clear that this is not an endorsement of his theory of the state, nor is this section aimed at reproducing that analysis.
56. Banaji (2020) p. 129
57. Ibid, pp. 130-1
58. Ibid, pp. 132-3
59. Ibid, p. 133
60. Brenner, R. Merchants & Revolution (2003) [1993], p. 54
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid, p. 203
63. Ibid, pp. 649-50
64. Ibid, pp. 650-1
65. Ibid, pp. 652-3
66. Ibid, p. 653
67. Ibid, p. 655
68. Ibid, pp. 655-6
69. Ibid, p. 657
70. Ibid, p. 659
71. Blissett (2003) p. 404
72. Marx (1976) p. 929