From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@STANFORD.EDU)
Date: Thu May 15 2003 - 11:56:26 EDT
Let me couple my anxieties about Marx's theory of value (to which Jurriaan and Andy B have spoken) with worries about Marxist theories of history. Some notes on Marx's theory of history. It would seem that modes of production, over history, change in the degree of independence of parts by which I mean production units. In the theory of the Asiatic mode of production , the village communities are claimed to be completely independent and self-sufficient units of production and consumption (the theory of the AMP does deserve the burial for which Perry Anderson called long ago); in capitalism the production units are enterprises which are interdependent directly or indirectly upon another. This interdependence is captured in neo-classical, Sraffian and Marxian theories of price: a change in one part of the system implies widespread changes elsewhere. The degree of integration which is achieved in bourgeois society is most starkly revealed in the world historic event of a general crisis in which each cannot sell because each will not buy. Neither the total independence of parts nor complete holistic interdependence are thus basic states; the degree of independence of parts in a system is a historically changing property. In other words, Marx's view of the history of modes of production and the nature of totality is dialectical. What I have suggested to Ian is that I don't think it's historically valid or logically tenable to allow for the maximum level of interdependence and integration of parts, i.e. production units, in a system of simple commodity production. Of course in the highly interdependent and integrated capitalist mode of production in which production units are characteristically commodity- and profit-making enterprises which employ "free" wage labor a few of the parts may however be units of simple commodity production or slave plantation production or peasant production. But these will exist as exceptions. The parts can be heterogeneous at the margins. As a result of these exceptions becoming parts of the bourgeois totality or the capitalist mode of production their properties may also change--it's another dialectical principle that the properties of parts are often acquired by being parts of a particular whole; these exceptional parts may acquire a capitalist character. Marx lays out how both the independent craftsman was converted by merchants into a wage laborer and the slave plantation acquired a capitalist character.Jairus Banaji has explored how tenants and peasants were transformed into wage laborers (see the section on Agrarian Capitalism at http://epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=1999&leaf=10&filename=551&filetype=htmlThis puts me closer to Wallerstein than Brenner, I believe (though I accept much of Jairus' criticism of dependency and world systems theory). Perhaps closer to the Peruvian sociologist Anabel Quijano as well. I am here using some of the dialectical principles laid out by Lewontin and Levins to make sense of this view to myself. A couple of other notes. The theory of the Asiatic Mode of Production with which GA Cohen could not be bothered has the structure of an adaptation in the strong Darwinian sense (see Richard Lewontin's critique of neo Darwinism). That is, the properties of the AMP are explained entirely in terms of the properties of a particularly harsh environment--Marx's enthusiasm for geographic determinist and crudely prejudiced Pierre Tremaux should be reason for concern as it was in fact for Engels (see Diane Paul). Society and environment are treated in a "strongly asymmetrical" ways (to use Peter Godfrey Smith's expression), with environmental pressures driving a process of adjustment or accomodation on the part of society. Since the external environment is posited as stable so then is society once the adaptation has been achieved. Hence Asiatic peoples are thought to be without history! European history is understood differently. While all of Europe may have long ago lived in the form of the present Asiatic village, the Aryan family underwent a splitting of the lineage. Where for the early Orientalists a common Indo Aryan language base was thought to indicate common race, Europeans came in the course of the 19th century to understand themselves on the basis of the new ethnological sciences and archaeology as having split from the Aryan family a long time ago and evolved into a deeply different and indeed superior race, a race which alone had made and could make history (this is of course why the Nazis could carry out a genocide against the gypsies as an inferior race despite their sharing a common language base--see Thomas Trautmann). Marxism also became not simply a Eurocentric ideology but also a European supremacist ideology which is implied even today in what a GA Cohen or Ellen Meiksins Wood does not evaluate with any care in Marx's theory of history. Wood in fact resurrects the AMP theory though she not only thereby deprives the mass of humanity of the historical dynamic by which a nation state- based capitalism was reached (a tenable but perhaps unprovable position) but also of any historical dynamic whatsoever. >If the primitive state was the controller of economic resources and >the major appropriator and distributor of surplus product [Sharma >contests this--rb], the advanced 'Asiatic' state may represent a >more or less natural development out of that primitive form [so the >Asiatic has had a natural, not truly social, development?]- the >appropriating redistributive public power at its highest stage of >development. Seen in this light, it is not so much the 'hypertrophy' >of the 'Asiatic'state [all those state forms can be so reduced!!!rb] >that needs to be explained [Wood has not explained this 'natural' >development]. What requires explanation is the aberrant, uniquely >'autonomous' development of the economic sphere that eventually >issued in capitalism. Democracy Against Capitalism. In the theory of the AMP, the hypertrophic state of course blocks any historical dynamic whatsoever! Wood has not only reserved aberrant development for Europe but also autonomous development itself. By accepting the gross distortions of the ideology of the AMP-- Wood cites not a single expert critique of the AMP theory, not Habib, Kosambi, Sharma, Leach, Brook, ed., O'Leary, etc.--she also makes impossible any true accounting of those differences internal (Roman law, putative uniqueness of European absolutism) and external (primitive accumulation in the Americas as source of both capital and resources--see Blackburn and Pomeranz, respectively) to Western European society which actually explain its aberrant development of an autonomous economy or its historical priority as the first post tributary society or its supposedly singular capacity for true historical change. One cannot simply assume that the aberration of modern Western Europe is explained by the differentia specifica of Western European feudalism (of course Anderson insisted on the causal significance of the concatenation of Western antiquity and Western feudalism); indeed Western European feudalism must have been unique in some ways or some parts (though Marx's critique of Kovalevsky may need qualification), but that does in itself justify Wood's implicit judgment that Western Europe alone had a real historical trajectory against and beyond a hypertrophied state which is just her euphemism for oriental despotism. I am very uncomfortable with Wood's sweeping, unsubstantied references to something fantastic called the Asiatic state which she implies blocked real historical development at all times and everywhere in Asia unlike the uniquely fragmented Western social organization. There were however, let's say, long periods between Gupta, Mauryan and Mughal rule! One may also question whether her comparison between pre capitalist extra economic and purely economic bourgeois forms of exploitation is overdrawn, and allows her to underplay--though not ignore--how deeply the coercive state penetrates every aspect of the only ideologically free wage contract--and again this is better spelled out by neo classical economists like Stanley Engerman and legal realists like Robert J Steinfeld. The bourgeois state may not be hypertrophic, and what were once political powers may have been privatized by capitalist employers. But is capitalism to be differentiated from pre capitalism basically in terms of the absence of the direct extra economic coerion that allegedly reached its apogee in Oriental Despotism? As Balibar long ago noted, capitalism may also be unique in that the direct producers' production of the value equivalent of the mass of their own subsistence and surplus value is temporally coincident in and through the production of commodities for the world market. There is no reason why at times capitalist commodity production could not rely on direct extra-economic coercion, e.g., contract labor in Florida today or neo slavery in Brazilian forests; and there is no reason to downplay how extra economic coercion is ever present even in the making of the supposedly free wage contract. In the European context, Marxists of course never understood social classes as mutually compatible or a necessary result of the division of labor and adaptation to the environment. Rather as a result of a contradiction between forces and relations of production that develops, so to speak, behind everyone's back, exploiters have been forced to and found advantage in epochal changes in the form of exploitation--slavery, extra economically coercive rent-taking (labor rent, rent-in-kind- and money rent) and most recently wage labor (again most of humanity was to be stuck in the historical cul-de-sac of the Asiatic Mode until Europeans bequeathed to them however violently the gift of capitalism). In my opinion, there is a suspect teleology in this quasi Marxist reconstruction of a philosophy of history (though this is not true of Wood). History is implied to have an inner drive for freedom--the forms of exploitation are progressively less unfree. In Cohen's version humanity (by which he really means Europeans) is driven along by the mandate to develop the productive forces. Interestingly, such metaphysics can make human actors as alienated from the forces governing their existence as geographic determinism. Is a way beyond such metaphysics to be found--as suggested by Jairus--in Sartrean historical dialectics? Yours, Rakesh
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