ALB
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DJP wrote: “Also when we are talking about the origins of capitalism we are going to be talking about more than two classes, it’s only with fully developed capitalism that the landowning and the former middle class get absorbed into each other“
That was a point I have been trying to make but neither side will have it. The one wants to say that the landlords of the tine were feudal and the other that they were “bourgeois”.
Marx of course worked with a three-class analysis, as far as Britain was concerned, in both his economic and political writings. Working class exploited for surplus value by the capitalist class who were forced by the landowners to share some of this with them as ground-rent.
What’s the point of these titbits of information? The MCH does not argue that the objective members of a class all automatically behave in a way that conforms to the overall objective interests of that class. That would be crude economic determinism. An easy Aunt Sally to knock down.
“NO BRETON WILL BE REFUSED”. You mean those people in berets selling onions from their bikes? I suppose that as relatives of the Ancient Britons they have more right to live in Britain than the Anglo-Saxon invaders.
A headline into today’s Times:
”Attenborough: Curb capitalism to save Earth”.
He is quoted as saying in a Radio 5 podcast:
”The excesses the capitalist system has brought us have got to be curbed somehow. That doesn’t mean to say that capitalism is dead. I’m not an economist and I don’t know, but I believe the nations of the world, the ordinary people worldwide, are beginning to realise that greed does not actually lead to joy”
Curbing capitalism — ie slowing down the rate of accumulation — won’t work because capitalism is precisely a system of capital accumulation sourced from profits. What might work is investment in non-fossil fuel energy becoming profitable as seems to be becoming the case, slowly.
Expecting capital accumulation to be curbed — the aim of all environmental pressure groups including XR — is just tilting at windmills. Capitalism can’t be curbed and it’s futile to try.
The only way out is to abolish capitalism altogether by making the Earth’s natural and industrial resources the common heritage of all so production can be geared to meeting people’s needs directly instead of to the accumulation of capital.
It’s all in that article by the SWPer you posted a link to. Accordingly to him, it would be the imperial bureaucracy as a collective-owning class. But I think it depends on what period of history you have in mind. Anyway, he seems to know what he’s talking about.
I read through that pamphlet-length article, Matt, and the introduction in which the author outlines the theory which he is going to criticise almost convinced me that the theory made some sense !
The criticism is basically that the concept is too wide to be useful as it covers so many different types of social and state structures. This is some validity in this but the theory doesn’t mean that sub-categories couldn’t be identified on the basis of something that some but not all share in common.
The other criticism is that they can’t all have been basically the same as otherwise how come that capitalism only emerged out of one of them — European feudalism? Therefore, this must have had a different “mode of production” to the others.
European feudalism had its own particular features and why capitalism emerged from it rather than one of the others is an important question. But this does not mean that the difference that led to this had to result from a different way in which the producers worked the land. That would be difficult to show.
In Defence of Marxism is the theoretical journal of those in the old Militant Tendency who remained loyal to Ted Grant and stayed in the Labour Party (where they still are I suppose).
There is another way out of the feudalism/not feudalism debate and that is to introduce a term that covers all pre-capitalist class societies:
The State and the Tributary Mode of Production
Actually, I think a good case can be made out for saying that the order of social evolution is: tribal communism, society based on the direct exploration of agriculture producers (peasants, if you like), capitalism, socialism.
That way, we don’t have to argue that feudal Europe was more advanced than the Roman Empire or that European feudalism existed all over the world. It was just the peasant-exploiting society out of which capitalism evolved. Capitalism then spread to the rest of the world at the expense of other types of peasant-exploiting societies.
That blog post that YMS put up shows how in popular parlance “feudalism” has come to be associated with open robbery of the producers as opposed to the more subtle and not so obvious robbery that capitalism brings about by the operation of its economic laws. A consequence of the ideological victory of the Intellectual champions of the rising bourgeoisie over their opponents, the defenders of feudalism.
I thought we had reached a consensus that “revolution” had a political sense as a more or less rapid change in political control whereas the better word for what you have just referred to would be “evolution”, a gradual socio-economic change that eventually prepares the ground for a political revolution (as happened in 1640).
Otherwise we start to go round in circles again.
More on the Sunak’s supposed “sacred responsibility to balance the books” from column by Sunday Times economic editor, David Smith, in today’s Times:
”The reality is different. Balanced budgets are rare. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s database goes back to 1948 and there are no years in which public sector net borrowing— the budget deficit — was exactly zero. In thirteen years there was a budget surplus; of these, eight were under Labour governments, five under the Tories.”
Incidentally, that means that in those 72 years there was a budget deficit in 59 of them — and the (capitalist) world didn’t come to an end. So a budget deficit is not even a big problem for capitalism let alone for wage workers (in fact it’s not our problem at all).
The problem is not whether or not by 1640 the capitalist mode of produced had largely replaced feudalism as production by serfs tied to the land — obviously it had, otherwise those in favour of it developing would have had no material basis for their struggle — but which class (if any) the Charles I regime represented.
Here’s how the two authors of the book describe the problem (without necessarily agreeing with it; nor do I):
“In examining the character of class conflicts in the making of the first ‘stage’ in the English Revolution, the ‘Great Revolution’ of 1640, traditional Marxist explanations of the Civil War have focused on the role of the rising gentry, conceived as an emerging bourgeois class. The two sides in the Civil War, parliamentary forces and royalists, are thus conceived as the agents of two opposing classes representing antagonistic modes of production: a rising capitalism and declining feudalism. This interpretation has not fared well with the more contemporary historiography and has been largely abandoned. A problem with it has been the difficulty in identifying the continuing existence of a distinctly feudal class to which the rising capitalist bourgeoisie was opposed. For by the time of the English Civil War, the ruling landed classes were, according to Robert Brenner, ‘by and large – though not of course uniformly – capitalist, in the sense of depending on commercial farmers paying competitive rents, rather than one that was sharply divided into advanced and backward sectors’.”
They go on to add:
“Yet the extent of Brenner’s depiction of such a thoroughgoing capitalist transformation of pre-revolutionary England society remains open to much debate. Henry Heller, for example, has pointed out that the nobility in northwest England remained an outpost of feudal reaction, and that this area was a royalist stronghold throughout the period.”
I don’t think these reactionary nobles could be described as being part of the bourgeoisie, so I don’t go along with the idea that the Civil War was between two sections of the bourgeoisie. But was Charles ruling on their behalf? Of course they supported him but they can’t have been much help in solving the financial difficulties of his state.
I see from something Wez has found (chapter 6 of this book) that I have been/am a “consequentialist” without knowing it, i.e have been arguing that the important thing about a political revolution that removes obstacles to capitalist development is not so much who carries out the revolution or what their intentions are but the outcome.
Anyway, here’s how that view is explained:
“While the bourgeoisie did in fact play some role in the classical revolutions, as we examine below, this agent-centred conceptualisation of bourgeois revolutions is itself unnecessary, if not unhelpful. Rather than looking at the intentions or composition of the agents involved in the making of revolutions, there is a veritable tradition of thinking (Marxist and non-Marxist) that conceptualises revolutions in terms of their socio-economic and political consequences. The most significant factor for this ‘consequentialist’ school of thought in classifying a revolution as ‘bourgeois’ is whether or not it removed the sociopolitical and ideological ‘obstacles’ (notably, the pre-capitalist state) to the development and consolidation of capitalism thereby establishing the state as an autonomous site of capital accumulation. For ‘f the definition of a bourgeois revolution is restricted to the successful installation of a legal and political framework in which the free development of capitalist property relations is assured’, Gareth Stedman Jones writes, ‘there is then no necessary reason why a “bourgeois revolution” need be the direct work of a bourgeoisie’. Bourgeois revolutions are therefore best understood ‘not as revolutions consciously made by capitalist agents’, but in terms of their developmental outcomes: revolutions that in one form or another promote the further development of capitalism. This then shifts the definitional content of the concept from the class that makes the revolution to the effects a revolution has in promoting and/or consolidating a distinctly capitalist form of state, which will in turn benefit the capitalist class irrespective of any role it played in the revolution. Bourgeois or capitalist revolutions therefore denote a sociopolitical transformation – ‘a change in state power, which is the precondition for large scale capital accumulation and the establishment of the bourgeoisie as the dominant class’.
The Lesser Awful argument, I like it. Perhaps we should adopt it instead of the Lesser Evil so as to avoid any theological implications.
Actually, Chomsky’s argument here is not as straightforward as he is suggesting as it’s not just voting against the Most Awful candidate but voting for the one of the other awful candidates more likely to defeat him. In fact, voting for them even if there’s a candidate standing who you might not consider awful at all.
The media are also reporting:
”Mr Sunak promised the “overwhelming might of the British state will be placed at your service” to those struggling financially,”
Oh yes? What is this “overwhelming might”? As experience over many years has shown, the state does not have the might to overcome the economic laws of capitalism. Those struggling financially will continue to struggle financially if the operation of capitalism brings about a higher level of unemployment — and the supposedly mighty state won’t be able to do anything to stop it.
Sunak’s statement about the “overwhelming might of the British state” rivals for hubris Gordon Brown’s claim to have ended the boom/slump.
