Dear Leo and Sam,
I plan to read your entire NLR article in all its interesting detail but there is one thing that caught my eye:
“Though the mercantile empires of Europe’s absolutist states were present at capitalism’s birth, the first empire to be driven by capitalist logic–pursuing profits through the creation of value in competitive production rather than simply through exchange, and exporting capitalist property relations to its colonies–was that of Britain. Yet even as the 19th-century British state extended its territorial colonial empire, it was also pioneering a new type of ‘informal imperialism’: sponsoring foreign investment and bilateral trade-and-‘friendship’ treaties outside the administrative Empire, and even allowing other capitals to have access to these markets. Britain thus played the leading role in the extension of some of the key conditions for the operation of the law of value internationally, from the free-trade policy to the gold standard. Herein lay the seeds of the epochal shift from pre-capitalist territorial imperialisms to capitalist imperialism of the modern type.
“That said, there was a continuing tension between the imperatives of capitalism and those of British colonialism. Even as it exported capitalist property relations to its dominions, Britain also oversaw, and in some cases even reinforced, pre-capitalist ones.”
This obviously is in line with Ellen Meiksins Wood’s analysis, which also makes a sharp distinction between capitalist property relations driven by the logic of profit and “precapitalist” property relations that seemed to exist everywhere except in England.
Recently I had an exchange with Neil Davidson about bourgeois revolutions and the transition to capitalism, based on his Historical Materialism article. He made the very useful observation that the Brenner-Wood theory of capitalism has much in common with that of the Vienna school libertarians who also make market exchange on the basis of profit a ‘sine qua non.’ I agree strongly with Davidson on this point. I also found his delving into the Grundrisse useful, especially his reference to Marx’s statement that capitalism could have arisen anywhere–not just in Great Britain.
I found myself poking into the Grundrisse a bit, although I had to get over a certain prejudice against the work based on my perception that it was strictly the bailiwick of Marxist academics just as the novels of Jane Austen are the bailiwick of the MLA. I honed in on the sections that have been published separately as “Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations,” which seems very germane to the matter at hand.
For Marx, “pre-capitalist” is a category very much tied up with the production of use values, or what is often called ‘the natural economy’. Maurice Bloch wrote a number of books that described societies based on such social relationships. This is what Marx says:
The crucial point here is this: in all these forms, where landed property and agriculture form the basis of the economic order, and consequently the economic object is the production of use values — i.e., the reproduction of the individual in certain definite relationships to his community, of which it forms the basis — we find the following elements:
1. Appropriation of the natural conditions of labor, of the earth as the original instrument of labor, both laboratory and repository of its raw materials; however, appropriation not by means of labor, but as the preliminary condition of labor. The individual simply regards the objective conditions of labor as his own, as the inorganic nature of this subjectivity, which realizes itself through them. The chief objective condition of labor itself appears not as the product of labor, but occurs as nature. On the one hand, we have the living individual, on the other the earth, as the objective condition of his reproduction.
2. The attitude to the land, to the earth, as the property of the working individual, means that a man appears from the start as something more than the abstraction of the “working individual”, but has an objective mode of existence in his ownership of the earth, which is antecedent to his activity and does not appear as its mere consequence, and is as much a precondition of his activity as his skin, his senses, for whole skin and sense organs are also developed, reproduced, etc., in the process of life, they are also presupposed by it. What immediately mediates this attitude is the more or less naturally evolved, more or less historically evolved and modified existence of the individual as a member of a community — his primitive existence as part of a tribe, etc.
Needless to say, this is not about the creation of commodities.
However, everywhere that England established colonies–whether or not free labor or markets prevailed–commodity production prevailed. This was true of the slavery-based sugar plantations of the Caribbeans or the mines of South Africa, which involved all forms of coercion.
I would hope that you would avoid the temptation of using terms like “pre-capitalist territorial imperialisms” without rolling up your sleeves and doing the hard work necessary to define them. This is something that has always annoyed me about Ellen Meiksins Wood’s forays into these questions. When you write a book titled “The Origin of Capitalism”, as she did, and devote a single paragraph to slavery, something is obviously wrong.