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
