Marxism, the bourgeoisie and capitalist imperialism. posted by Richard Seymour

The bourgeois fairy-tale is much as follows: capitalism is simply the fullest augmentation, the completest development of commercial society. The human tendency to truck, trade and barter developed slowly out of communal societies with their increasingly complex divisions of labour; reached a peak in Greco-Roman civilisation (even with all its flaws); was suppressed by hordes of Barbarians who introduced irrationalist, status-oriented, communalist, aristocratic societies based on direct coercion; was liberated by the development of towns and cities, in which commerce and trade thrived, thus moulding the kinds of individualist, democratic and liberal ideologies that galvanised the masses into throwing off feudal shackles. Since then, the constant revolutionising of the means of production, an explosion in science and culture, the rationalisation of increasingly meritocratic hierarchies, the development of law, both domestic and international, and the general embetterment of humanity. Oh sure, a few mistakes, a few Great Tragedies, a few rotten apples spoiling an otherwise lush barrel - but then you don't want to return to the Middle Ages do you? No? Then get you to the clapped out bordello of Once Upon A Time and Happily Ever After! And don't forget to clap and cheer when we bomb those intransigent Arabs and Mussies who have refused Progress (an offer no one may refuse, no matter what Progress is taken to mean in any conjuncture).

It can't have escaped your notice that such a narrative is implicit in one form or another in certain radical or even, dare I say it, soi-disant Marxist narratives? There is not a shortage of Whiggish liberals who appear to think that Marx would have been On Their Side, usually against 'feudal theocrats' and their putative apologists/supporters. Perhaps they've had a read of Francis Wheen's elegant if sometimes misleading biography of Marx and, having seen him suitably domesticated, suitably humanised with his piles and flaws and rumbustiousness, have decided that he was an alright sort of cove, who merely Took Things Too Far. He was right about the bourgeoisie's revolutionary zeal, prophetic about capitalism's expansion, surely just in his wrath about the bad things in capitalism - to take it any further than that, to take his strange prophecies about capitalism's downfall and his advocacy of revolution seriously, would be to labour over the froth of what is only small beer.

It isn't that there is nothing in Marx's writing that might contribute to such perceptions. There is his advocacy of Free Trade; his heroic idealisation of the bourgeoisie's role in the Manifesto; the support for Abraham Lincoln; and his very complex writings on British imperialism in India. About these, nothing may be added that isn't spectacularly evident in the texts: Marx praised Free Trade only inasmuch as it would increase the prospects of revolution; his praise of Lincoln and the constitutionalist North was short-lived - Marx later criticised the timidity of the North, arguing that the war to end slavery was best fought as a revolutionary war, and had specifically praised Lincoln to the extent that his ending of slavery as a source of super-exploited labour for the bourgeoisie would also be a leap forward for the working class as a whole; the puffing of the bourgeoisie was an expression of the wish that it, weak in Marx's time, might destroy the old feudal forms of rule which persisted, as well as a rhetorical agitation for the real fulfilment of the bourgeoisie's promises; the writings on India were certainly not free of the Orientalist accretions of his time (neither is his Asiatic Mode of Production thesis for that matter), he did acknowledge that "The Indian will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the new ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether." And then: "The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked." Utterly relevant though this may be, unalloyed progressivism it is not.

Still, the narrative in the Manifesto does ascribe to the bourgeoisie a fundamentally progressive role, particularly in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, in the pitiless destruction of old social forms, the tearing asunder of all walls, the profaning of all that is holy, the drowning of heavenly ecstasies in the icy water of egoistic calculation etc. Importantly, the bourgeoisie rescues "a considerable part of the population from the idiocies of rural life". (My old boss used to love that quote). In that Marx, so EM Wood argues (in both The Pristine Culture of Capitalism from 1991 and The Origin of Capitalism, from 2002), we do not yet have a version of capitalism as a distinct break with the past: instead, capitalism is released from its primitive forms in the interstices of feudalism, liberated from the parcellisation and disarticulation of political power, and carried forward by the bourgeoisie, a descendant of the town-dwelling bhurgers, themselves descendants of oppressed serfs. For Marx's truly Marxist take, we need to Grundrisse and Capital. In his account of "the so-called primitive accumulation" of capital, Marx moves from a conception of capital as wealth and trade to an understanding of capital as embodying a specific social relation. Accumulation, whether from imperial theft or commerce, is not sufficient to create capitalism - it is not merely an augmentation of commerce. For capitalism to come about, social and property relations must be revolutionised. The specific laws of capitalism are not those that animate the small town trader to sell his wares: they are the imperatives of competition and profit-maximisation, the compulsion to reinvest surplus and the systemic need to constantly improve productivity.

And here Wood notes a curious paradox: the first country in which capitalism developed was England, and yet this was not brought about by the bourgoisie in urban settings. Rather, it was driven by large landowners in agrarian settings, often enclosing land - thereby depriving it of customary communal use so that it may be put to profitable uses as pasture (a practise defended in Locke's theory of property). The enclosures created masterless vagabonds, who might have created social anarchy and faced extinction were it not for state intervention, which ensured that instead they were convoked as a labour market. This, Wood suggests, might give us the right to deconstruct the binary oppositions of bourgeois theology: rural v urban; bourgeois v aristocrat; status v contract; coercion v liberty; etc.

As Wood is to a large extent distilling Brenner, it is worth revisiting what he has to say in his enormous and brilliant tome, Merchants and Revolution. If you happen to have this book, and have been desperately flipping through pages of detail about the development of commerce, the rise of the merchant opposition, the East India company, the colonies and so on in search of the heuristic, here's a tip: it's in the postscript. Brenner goes to great labours to show that the merchant class was not a revolutionary class devoted to the overthrow of feudalism. The majority were Royalists, whose wealth and power owed much to aristocratic privilege and favour. The parliamentarians tended to be middling traders and colonial entrepreneurs, those who would commit capital to the expansion of the tobacco trade in Virginia (while the traditional mercantile elite would not), and from whose ranks a new elite was created that led the shift from free white to enslaved black labour, and from small-scale tobacco production to large-scale sugar plantation (particularly after 1640). It was this new elite that formed the backbone of the parliamentarian movement. They were overwhelmingly from the 'middling sort', shopkeepers, artisans, a few sons of minor gentry and so on - people largely cut off from traditional sources of commercial, political and ecclesiastical power. The fact that the merchant class had worked with the state to exclude the middling sort from involvement in overseas commerce was a source of considerable political anger, and contributed substantially to the dynamism of that layer in the Civil War.

However, the transition from feudalism to capitalism had been effected and was being effected by a new capitalist aristocracy who, having relied on political-coercive claims on peasant production from the land (a means of production which the peasants owned), were so weakened by peasant resistance that they sought instead to place a claim on the land and turn it over to profitable use, entering into contractual agreements with free, market-dependent tenants who often employed wage labour. The bulk of the ruling class, according to Brenner, had become capitalist in this sense before the Civil War, which in the traditional narrative would have represented the emancipation of capital from the feudal shackles. I simply raise this argument, knowing it to be controversial, as an illustration of how Whiggish histories apparently operating within the historical materialist framework might be challenged. The criticisms of this thesis are often well above my head and well without my province (for instance, I have no way of judging the validity of Brenner's claim that most of England's ruling class was capitalist prior to 1640, which is heavily contested in some quarters - in connection with this, it isn't true, as Perry Anderson claimed, that Brenner concedes a transitional role to the revolutionary bourgeoisie. The equation of bourgois with capitalist is precisely what Brenner sets out to challenge on the one hand, and on the other, he attributes a substantial role in the parliamentarian side of the Civil War to the landowning class, who were certainly not against absolutism or aristocracy).

What is worth saying is that Brenner's case is consistent with Marx's treatment of "the so-called primitive accumulation", inasmuch as the decisive movement is not the freeing of capital (supposedly in a 'bourgeois revolution') as much as the creation of the new social relation known as capital. Anyway, even if you will argue that it has historically been the case, it isn't necessarily the case that the bourgeoisie must defeat a feudal class to create the conditions in which capital may operate. If the paradigm of the 'bourgeois revolution' rests on the conflation of 'bourgeois' with 'capitalist', it also relies on some obfuscation. If the French revolution was bourgeois, it is by no means clear that it was capitalist. And if a section of the bourgeoisie in England was both revolutionary and capitalist, this could only be because capitalism had already been established as a unique social relation (rather than simply having evolved out of commerce). Aside from this, as Brenner and Wood point out, this narrative is heavily dependent on the standard bourgeois commercialization thesis, and is therefore deterministic and 'stageist'.

Final point on Wood's version of capitalist imperialism, described through the instance of Ireland but more widely applicable. Since many left accounts of the rise of capitalism tend to accentuate the role of colonial exploitation in the 'primitive accumulation of capital', Wood points out that a) this is to confuse capital as social relation with capital as wealth and b) Spain was an early colonial power which exploited South America's mines to the hilt, yet tended to expend this 'capital' on feudal pursuits. Colonial wealth would certainly have contributed to the development of capitalism once established, but it would not have been a sufficient or even necessary cause of capitalism. What capitalism did do, however, was alter the nature of imperialism. Colonialism, slavery and the plantation took new forms, and were usually intensified. Precapitalist imperialism tended to find labour attached to land more valuable than land own its own, while capitalist imperialism with its imperative to improve productivity under competitive pressure had plenty of incentive to disposess direct producers. Extra-economic coercion was still now an alibi to economic transformation, rather than simply a means to obtaining a surplus. Capitalism in England had also produced a disposessed 'surplus population' that was also a potential wave of colonists (if you haven't already, see Rediker & Linebaugh's The Many-Headed Hydra on this process). And just as the expropriated of England and Ireland would often go on to collaborate in the expropriation of the New World, so the legal arguments used to justify the expropriation of the New World would be used to justify enclosures in England. But it is the economic imperatives imposed on the colonised that is new, and these usually involve disaster, going quite as far as genocide in North America. This isn't a progressivist view of capitalism - but then, Marx is not a progressivist either. In the earlier cited articles on India, I think what is worth noting, what is particularly Marxist about the approach is not this Jamesonian attitude of perfectly balancing the benefits (revolutionising) and drawbacks (greatest disaster ever) of capitalism in one's mind, without attenuating the force of either. Nor is it obviously a celebration of the progressive role of the bourgeoisie. It is the attempt to locate the opportunities for revolutionary change in the disasters and crimes wrought by the bourgeoisie. It is never a choice between the bourgeoisie and 'theocracy' or 'fascism' or whatever the case may supposedly be - where the former are not to be found in direct collusion with the latter, they remain opponents of the working class, and their imperialism has nothing to do with emancipation.

Update: Thanks to Louis Proyect for these links. Listen to Chris Harman debate Robert Brenner here; read a separate article by Harman here; read Louis' account here; and read Neil Davidson here. There's also an excellent couple of pieces from Neil Davidson in recent issues of Historical Materialism, but the articles are not yet available online as far as I know.