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I had access to Historical Materialism as a Columbia University employee and retain as a retiree but it has always been for issues that are at least 3 years old.
Checking in on it today, I discovered that issue four in 2013, which I now have access to, is a symposium on Jairus Banaji's "Theory as History" that won the Isaac Deutscher prize in 2013 against finalist Charles Post's "American Road to Capitalism". I rooted for Banaji just like somebody might root for their home team in the NCAA March Madness basketball championship. If you don't know by now, Post is a diehard Brennerite while Banaji is part of the growing movement in academia against it.
Post was one of the critics of Banaji's book. I hope to read both Banaji's book and this issue of HM when I find a spare moment--maybe in 2021 or so but in the meantime here's Banaji's pithy response to Post's criticisms:
Among the various points that Charlie Post makes in his critique is that 'Conceptually, the notion of merchant or commercial capitalism represents a step backwards for historical materialism'. But backwards from what exactly? The hermetic stagnation of a formalist historiography that remains thoroughly introverted both intellectually and theoretically? Certainly, infinitely less productive (of good history) than the substantial body of work (both Marxist and non-Marxist) on diverse groups of merchant capitalists across vast swathes of history - from Spanish traders in the Roman Mediterranean to the consorterie of powerful capitalists who controlled Venice's trade to the Levant and Venice itself some ten centuries later," or the Glasgow firms that dominated the tobacco trade in the eighteenth century,-or the London West-India merchant houses who were the backbone of the sugar industry in sectors of the Caribbean that had seen the most rapid expansion of slavery in the seventeenth century, or the London merchant-directors who were pivotal to the De Beers diamond business. As if any of these groups, or for that matter the large Italian mercantile and banking houses of the fourteenth century, were suspended in an economic void and not part of emerging or established networks of commercial capitalism! Indeed, in one of his earliest papers Brenner himself notes:
"In marked contrast to the established London trades colonial operations required investment in commodity production, not merely in commodity exchange... The nascent plantation economy needed constant injections of outside capital to get it started and keep it going... Merchants might purchase and directly operate their own plantations. Otherwise they could enter into partnership with colonial planters, supplying them with land, tools and servants and marketing the final product... As the number of participants grew, competition became increasingly fierce."
How is this not capitalism except by the circular abstraction that confines it by definition to industrial capital? In any case, it is almost thirty years since David Ormrod produced an excellent critique of the 'false antithesis' between production and circulation, capitalist agriculture and merchant capitalism, that underpins the whole of this tendency.
Related to this is our assessment of the place of modern slavery in the growth of capitalism. Post's further argument that 'plantation slavery, even when subordinated to a capitalist world-market, cannot be understood as a capitalist form of social labour' contradicts Marx's own repeated assertions to the effect that the American plantation owners were capitalists, e.g., 'The husiness in which slaves are used is conducted by capitalists']'' 'we now not only call the plantation owners in America capitalists, but... they are capitalists';* and so on. Not so Post, who refers evasively to planters being 'compelled to maximise absolute surplus-labour extraction' (his italics). But 'absolute surplus-labour' is of course a meaningless expression. Marx nowhere talks about 'absolute' and 'relative' surplus-labor (how could he?), the distinction he makes is between absolute and relative surplus-value. For obvious reasons. Post is reluctant to talk about American slaves being compelled to produce surplus-value, as that would be conceding too much ground.
Post's key objection is that 'the slaves could not be expelled from production to allow the introduction of labour-saving tools and methods and a shift to relative surplus-labour [sic!] extraction... instead they must he sold to another master'.' But this distinction affects only the determination of form (slaves were fixed capital, the price paid for a slave is, for Marx, an 'anticipated and capitalized surplus-value').' To sustain the argument. Post would have to show that the US slave economy entailed inherent constraints on the liquidation of slave capital, in other words, that there was no market for slave labour, whereas the evidence suggests that the buying and selling of slaves occurred on a large scale.'' Slaves could be expelled, planters could introduce labour-saving machinery," and massive investments in slave labour could 'enhance the productivity of future laborers', as with the creation of South Carolina's tidal rice plantations.
In any case, it is worth noting that the position Post and other 'political Marxists' espouse is even less nuanced than the one Genovese took in "The World the Slaveholders Made". For the latter there was clearly no essential conflict between using slave labour and running a capitalist enterprise. If there had been, it would be hard to see how Genovese could have written, 'The rise of the sugar ingenio in nineteenth-century Cuba represented the rise of a new class of capitalist slaveholders for whom slavery was an economic expedient', or described the slaveholders of the British Caribbean as installing a regime that 'bore the clear stamp of capitalist enterprise'.
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