====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
Weekly Worker 849 Thursday January 20 2011 Marxism and theoretical overkill Mike Macnair reviews Jairus Banaji's 'History as theory: essays on modes of production and exploitation' Historical Materialism books series, Vol 25, Leiden, 2010, pp406, £81 http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004237 >From the review. It should be obvious that I see eye to eye with Banaji on many things, without necessarily agreeing with his decision to be interviewed by the Platypus people: It seems to me that Banaji succeeds in demonstrating certain of his specific claims. In particular: 1. There was very substantial use of wage labour in agriculture (and elsewhere) in many pre-modern societies. (Chapters 3, 4 and 6). 2. There is a spectrum between the considerable degree of freedom (of movement, of choice of employer, etc) of many workers in the more developed capitalist countries and the total unfreedom of chattel slaves. Neither the chattel slavery of Africans in the early modern to 19th century plantation economies nor forms of indentured labour, debt-bondage, sharecropping and so on, then or more recently, can be said to show the existence of (in any strong sense) pre-capitalist social relations of production in a country (chapter 5). 3. Following the last two points, phenomena of labour relations at the point of production alone cannot be used to identify the mode of production in the larger sense or to describe the larger society as pre-capitalist (passim in the book). 4. Following on from all this, the ‘Brenner thesis’ that capitalism emerged in England as a result of a specific mutation in labour relations in agriculture is to be rejected. Rather capitalism, at least in its modern sense, emerged in the later middle ages in the Mediterranean interface of Catholic Christendom, Byzantium and the Dar al-Islam (chapter 9). 5. Indian agriculture in the 19th century was dominated by capitalist relations, although these were mainly ones of (in Marx’s terminology) the formal subsumption of labour under capital (household commodity production dependent on and organised by merchants and moneylenders) rather than ones of the real subsumption of labour under capital (large-scale shipping, factory production and mechanised or semi-mechanised large-scale farming). ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
