Modes of Production and the Transition to Capitalism with Jairus Banaji
Modes of Production and the Transition to Capitalism with Jairus Banaji

Modes of Production and the Transition to Capitalism with Jairus Banaji

Donald and Rudy join Jairus Banaji, author of Theory as History and A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism to discuss his theoretical  contributions around the mode of production debates. We begin with his  political starts in the UK and in India, and how he saw the  organizational and cultural failures of the left in both countries, the  debates on the mode of production in India and what he brought to this  debate using the theories of formal and real subsumption. We turn to his  analysis of the modes of production in Ancient Rome, the method of  historical materialism, the origins of capitalism and the moments of  truth in the existing camps, the very particular emergence of capitalism  in the US, the importance of vertical integration and how all of this  plays in to the debates around merchant capitalism. Finally, we discuss  capitalism in the Islamic world, imperialism and unequal exchange, and  the importance of having open theoretical debate in Marxism.

Some of the works mentioned during this conversation:

K. Kautsky – The Agrarian Question (Agrarfrage)
Grossmann – The Theory of Economic Crisis
Glyn and Sutcliffe – British Workers and the Profits Squeeze
Utsa Patnaik – ‘Class Differentiation within the Peasant’
Arthur Rosenberg (Roman Historian)
M. Weber – The Social Causes of the Decay of Ancient Civilization
J. Banaji – Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity: Gold, Labour, and Aristocratic Dominance
M. Finley – The Ancient Economy
W. Heyd – Geschichte des Levantehandels im Mittelalter
J.P. Sartre – The Problem of Method
A. D. Chandler – Scale and Scope. The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism
A. Sohn-Rethel – Economy And Class Structure Of German Fascism
Nairn-Anderson thesis, for a summary see here
M. Dobb – Studies in the Development of Capitalism
Scott P. Marler – The Merchants’ Capital: New Orleans and the Political Economy of the Nineteenth-Century South
S. D. Smith. – Slavery, Family, and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic: The World of the Lascelles, 1648-1834.
A. Emmanuel – Unequal Exchange
E. Hobsbawm – The Age of Empire: 1875-1914

Liked it? Take a second to support Cosmonaut on Patreon! At Cosmonaut Magazine we strive to create a culture of open debate and discussion. Please write to us at CosmonautMagazine@gmail.com if you have any criticism or commentary you would like to have published in our letters section.
Become a patron at Patreon!