Patrimonial Bonapartism, Part I: What Is "Pre-Capitalism"?
This is a Part I contribution to the intriguing characterization of the Trump
government as a "patrimonial bonapartism". This Part seeks to clear the
Brenner thesis on the origins of capitalism out of the way of an accurate
characterization of the historical foundations of the US State. That State and
its foundation are still the institutional context within which any governance
must operate. The conclusion will be that the USA was very much founded as a
pre-capitalist merchant republican state.
An accurate perspective on the present US political situation, and of the US
state, is of obvious vital importance for socialists, other partisans of the
working class , and would be revolutionaries. Assuming the State itself
survives intact, the USA will remain an importantly powerful political and
economic entity on the world scene even after "the fall of the (so-called)
'American Empire'", even after the long train of failed attempts at "hegemony"
or outright domination. Not a mere academic subject, though the subject
naturally is of great scholastic interest.
The intent is to contribute to a comradely discussion that drives toward the
truth about the US state, without compromising on critique. If critique
appears sharp at times, apologies in advance. Apologies also for its length,
but words must be spent against the Brenner thesis, woefully inadequate, even
obscuring, for grasping the historical and social character of the US state,
the context for any appraisal of the Trump government.
The entire geopolitical world order established after World War II,
fundamentally dedicated to the "struggle against communism", is now coming
undone. It will not be restored. The individual states that comprise the
world state system manifest this global undoing in a variety of ways dependent
upon the relation of their political superstructures with their social bases,
some "immense" as with the United States, some not so immense as with the
world's many microstates. Secondarily there are the geopolitical economic
effects of the relations between the states. "Social bases" consist of forces
of production, social under modern industrial capitalism and, analytically left
out by Marx, forces of social reproduction. In their essence these "forces"
are the mass of direct producers, and only secondarily their technical
composition and combination.
The historically unprecedented development of the productive forces by Chinese
capitalism is the basic reason for this undoing. This development has rendered
much of the productive capacity of the "old core" imperialisms of North
America, Europe and Japan relatively redundant and superfluous on the world
scale. They can't compete under their old state regimes. At the same time the
Chinese state becomes the leading geopolitical force that seeks to restabilize
and preserve the same old world order undermined by its own development!
This contradiction, potential or actual, is the commonality that unites all of
the different varieties of political regime reactions. And they are all
literally reactionary "reactions", politically speaking, including China per
above. This is the general answer to the question raised by Anthony Teso in
the last paragraph of the OP, and also the beginning of an answer to the
second-to-last paragraph.
The question of the historical origins of the pre-French revolution states is
no small matter for understanding the US state. Antipodal to China, the United
States has become the leading destabilizer of the old world order founded by
itself after WW2. The answers for why this situation exists are not to be found
in the Brenner thesis on the origins of modern capitalism. Analytical Marxism
rejects the formulation in the above first paragraph as "technological
determinism", forgetting that the only real force of production is human labor
power under any social relation of production. "Technological determinism" is
basically a strawman argument put up by one of their member, G. A. Cohen, in
"Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense", and promptly knocked down by his
comrades.
The result has been the rejection of Marx's theory of revolution. This is not
the place to reprise a thorough critique of the Brenner Thesis and the
anti-dialectical Analytical Marxist methodology. Book length critics are out
there to be found. Suffice to say that the Brenner school collapses social
relations of production into mere market exchange relations, relations between
persons and things (as property). It is a retreat from classical Marxism back
to the very "Neo-Smithian Marxism" Brenner sought to critique. This was
Immanuel Wallerstein's World-Systems Theory. It is a difference between
internationalist Neo-Smithianism and Neo-Smithianism in one country.
Analytical Marxism was an Anglophone branch of the general retreat from
classical Marxism made by "Western Marxism". Included are the Americaphone
Baran and Sweezy Monthly Review school ('surplus' rather than surplus value),
and the Francophone Althusser school (Capital as structure rather than Marx's
theory of the revolutionary dissolution of structures) to cite the most
prominent cases. Adorno/Horkheimer and Lukács were central European
representatives of the same. All were reactions to 3rd International Comintern
practice after 1924 combined with the Golden Age of US capitalism after WW2,
and all were driven into the ditch by the crises and dissolution of the same in
the 1980's and 1990's, overtaken by post-structuralist/ postmodernist
theoretical fashion after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, at least into
the 2000's. The common thread, to one extent or another, was the rejection of
the classical Marxian dialectical methodology.
In general we need to "return" to classical Marxism before 1925, but to
critically identify the aporias and inconsistencies that need to be filled out
or updated. That would also include Leon Trotsky's theory of uneven and
combined development and the method of the transitional "program", both sadly
not understood or practiced by the successors claiming his name, for the same
reasons that gave rise to "Western Marxism". To name the most obvious, these
are the incomplete theories of imperialism, of the business cycle, of social
reproduction, and of modern "industrial" commercial capital.
What is meant by "pre-capitalism"? It depends on whether the subject is the
political or economic sphere. On this thread it is the political sphere.
Brenner's theory of a principally economic origin of capitalism in agrarian
England makes it poorly equipped to address questions of political structure,
not only in themselves, but more importantly in relation to economics. Ellen
Meiksins Wood turned this weakness into a virtue in "The Pristine Culture of
Capitalism", arguing against Perry Anderson / Tom Nairn on the anachronism of
the British State. All the better for British capital, said Wood! The
anachronistic State could be more easily subsumed to the relatively autonomous
determinations of capitalist economics as self-expanding value. This concept
explains the 19th century classical liberal ideological conception.
It is no coincidence that as of late, Brenner has had to deploy an oxymoron, "
political capitalism", in response to the clear line of descent of US
capitalism. Ironically for "political" Marxism, this is nevertheless an
advance! See Dylan Riley & Robert Brenner, "Seven Theses on American Politics"
(2022).
In the history of economics it further matters "which" capitalism we are
talking about. Marx constantly made the distinction between antediluvian
merchant capital and modern "industrial" capital, Marx's capital , even if he
was inconsistent on 16th century English agriculture, gave modern commercial
capital short shrift, and never mind where the metaphor of the "locomotive of
history" came from. R. H. Britnell in "The Commercialisation of English
Society 1000-1500" showed that "market dependence" was well developed in
England by the end of the 13th century, from high lord to enserfed peasant, to
the extent that England's silver penny currency increased by a factor of ten in
that century. Feudal relations of production as labor tribute had been
commutated to money rents by this time.
In general, markets, wage labor, and merchant capital have existed variably and
intermittently alongside tribute-extracting ancient and feudal states for
millennia. In that balance, ancient and medieval states, subsisting on
tribute, generally exercised political determinations for which pre-capitalist
economics was mere effect. However contradictory those relations may have
been, these were never irreconcilable contradictions. This is a key point for
defining what is meant by pre-capitalism.
It is true that there was a gradual displacement of feudal relations of social
reproduction - "servile incidents" -- in Western Europe from the 14th to the
18th centuries, by "market dependency", with variable regional outcomes as
Brenner has noted. This process was launched by the labor shortage in the wake
of the Great Plague (and its recurrences) that gave a class struggle advantage
to the surviving rural direct producers until the mid-16th century at least in
England, for longer in France. The final dissolution of serfdom in social
reproduction also modified the pre-capitalist political superstructure,
generally toward absolute monarchy, but that superstructure was not brought
down merely by changes in economic relations of production and social
reproduction.
The two apparent exceptions to feudal absolutism, Holland and especially
England, were nevertheless not exceptions to the general rule of the relative
compatibility of market and tribute. In England the advent of generalized
commercial farming generated a large surplus laboring population, but not
immediately a proletariat. Some were siphoned off into England's early
colonial settler ventures in the Americas, uncounted others simply perished on
the foul streets of London, but most important politically, they provided the
"revolutionary mob" that for a time ruled the London streets and beheaded and
removed a monarch.
So it can be established that the fundamental, but not only, criterion for
"pre-capitalism" is the absence of a mass industrial proletariat of sufficient
weight to constitute the dominant class of direct producers.
Nevertheless the emergence of a plebeian, but not proletarian, mass of direct
producers created the opening for a republican ("commonwealth") government of
"antediluvian" merchants, as Brenner himself amply documented in great detail
in "Merchants and Revolution”. As Anthony Teso correctly notes, "'Merchants
and Revolution' is built on the split within the London merchant class between
the company men, whose wealth rested on privileges granted by the crown, and
the new merchants of the American and West Indian trades, who had no such
grants and who supplied the parliamentary side its most radical fraction."
However it is not the case that "Politically constituted property was the
target of the revolution". Certainly the p olitically constituted property of
their Stuart crown opponents were a target, but the general form of State
sponsored property relations characteristic of antediluvian merchant capital
absolutely were not a target! The New Atlantic Merchants were seeking their
own form of republican State-backed property in merchant capital. They desired
a union with the Dutch Republic to acquire that form. Failing that, they handed
republican governance off to the Cromwell dictatorship, by the way to preview a
true Bonapartism, but see Part II of this response.
"New Atlantic Merchants" or not, these sought state power for the same reason
as did the Crown merchants of yore, and of the future. A century later it was
the class alliance of the hereditary landlord gentry and the Crown merchants
that came out on top. Politically, both were feudal relics, as will be further
argued below.
Therefore it is incorrect to state that "To offer the Levant and East India
Companies as proof that the English state was precapitalist is to name the
faction that lost." Not only did t he British New Atlantic Merchants lose in
the short run by 1660, but also in the medium run in the Restoration era, as
New Amsterdam was renamed after the Stuart Duke of York, and this outpost then
used as a base to end the autonomy of Puritan New England, see " 1676: The End
of American Independence", Stephen S. Webb.
The trans-Atlantic State-backed mercantile Triangular Trade developed during
the post-Glorious Revolution era. Britain's commissioning of privateering out
of its New York base, and its "free trade" policy for the African slave trade,
are not to be deployed as a revival of the New Atlantic Merchants. For in the
long run, it was the British East India Company that came out on top in the
1760's with the ejection of France from India. By the 1770s Britain was
stuffing EIC tea down the throats of its British American colonists.
Atlantic merchants would have to wait for the triumph of "the third British
revolution" that formed the United States to commandeer a State that served
their purposes. That included now, by the end of the 18th century, the conquest
of the North American continent. When the colonial settler plebeians
threatened to overtake the revolution between 1783 and 1786, as they had in the
English revolution, the slave owning merchants, with this historical knowledge,
quickly acted in the 1787 counterrevolutionary constitutional coup that gave
the U.S. the institutional foundations it still labors under today.
Only then can we say that the "New Atlantic" merchants had won. This may be
why Brenner abandoned this line of approach in his PhD thesis, for which
"Merchants and Revolution" was likely the published expression, in favor of
"agrarian capitalism" in one country. The conversion of English agricultural
production to a general commercial basis was a fairly unique development in the
16th and 17th centuries, but it was not the origin of Karl Marx's capitalism.
It is worth noting that Brenner's "capitalist" yeoman farmers did not form a
consistent political faction, or a decisive social force, in the English
revolution. Instead they split between Royalists and Parliamentarians if they
participated at all. This is registered in the variable stances taken by the
Elizabethan militias at the onset of the Civil War, a form of military
organization that still required the soldier to have the means to supply most
of their weaponry. Hence the yeomanry were important to the militia, and their
variable politics made this a problem for the Parliamentarians. That problem
provoked the formation of Cromwell's professionalized New Model Army.
The American Framers were the beneficiaries of the classical bourgeois
revolutions of the 17th century. They put that inheritance to good use,
especially that of the "Commonwealthmen" tradition that traced its ideology
back to James Harrington, according to the intellectual historian J. G. A.
Pocock, in " The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the
Atlantic Republican Tradition". Pocock in turn traced the ideological origins
of Harrington's utopian "Commonwealth of Oceana", published in the 1650's as a
response to the aforementioned failure to establish a stable bourgeois republic
in England, back to medieval reflections upon ancient republican Rome and to
the political ideologies of medieval republican northern Italian city states.
Pocock showed that Harrington was influenced on the one hand by the republican
Machiavelli of the Discourses and Art of War, with Harrington adding an
emphasis upon a "sound agrarian" as the social basis for raising a militia not
only for the protection of the State, as against professional or mercenary
armies, as these could be turned against a republic, but also as the best means
for a "republic for expansion", as farmer agrarians would have an interest in
the conquest of new lands for agrarian settlement. Sound familiar?
Note carefully that Harrington's "sound agrarian" also was a strategic move
away and against the revolutionary "urban mob". This was the key to the search
for bourgeois republican stability and permanence. Thomas Jefferson would
become the leading avatar for "hatred of the mass city" in favor of his own
agrarian republican utopia. But that covered only one pole of the problem of
stability. The other was the search for stability within the merchant
bourgeois class by the suppression of "faction".
Less familiar is that, despite the title of Pocock's book, several chapters
focus upon the Venetian political thoughts of Gionnotte and Contarini, via a
conservative transition from the Florentine aristocrat Guicciardini. Here the
emphasis was placed upon the relative stability of the Serenissima Republic,
apparently guaranteed by a complexity of layered institutions acting as checks
and balances, and elective rotation in office. This was the inspiration for
the Federal edifice invented in 1787. The Framers intention was to form a
combined and "self-limiting" autocratic-oligarchic federal republic that pushed
the plebeian democracy down and out to the individual states. The United
States as a whole was intended to harness the "sound agrarian" democracy of the
rural, small town plebeian settler-farmers, armed as state militias under the
2nd Amendment, to the domination of the mercantile oligarchy formed up in the
Federal center. For as much as the merchant oligarchs detested the rurals,
they needed them for the commercial conquest of a continent. The Serenissima
Republic combined with a "Roman republic for expansion" was seen as a check
upon the tendency of imperialist republics toward degeneration, corruption and
decay into autocratic princely rule. That was the original conception. It is
clearly defunct today.
The city, seen as the source of that corruption and decay, was to be secured
for the bourgeoisie against the urban "mob", who were to be excluded from
political society altogether and their "faction" suppressed by force. That
"mob" would eventually become the urban proletariat in the 20th century.
A first aside: If some of this resembles the Gordon Wood / Bernard Bailyn
historiography, that is because Bailyn lifted the Pocock thesis in the 1950s
and combined that with the "purely bourgeois" American Exceptionalism launched
by Louis Hartz, dedicated to the exclusion of socialism.
It was no exact copy, as Venice had no independent judiciary, while the black
box of an autocratic Supreme Court was James Madison's special brainchild. The
Venetian Republic had no written constitution. All in all though, Venice was
the perfection of a medieval merchant capitalist oligarchical city state. Above
all, Venice was a feudal bourgeois state of Marx's antediluvian merchants.
On this last point William A. Williams, in "The Contours of American History",
was on the right track when he called the 1787 document a "feudal
constitution", though he was mistaken in searching for a social basis in a
"landed gentry", relying on the narrow Neo-Smithian concept of "feudalism"
that, Pirenne-style, excludes the antediluvian merchants "because the market",
though Adam Smith himself was an opponent of mercantilism in theory and
practice.
Hartz was also partially correct in seeing the USA as a "purely bourgeois
liberal" republic, a bias also shared by classical Marxism, but what both
forgot was that, unlike Britain, the USA had only the slave-owning "New
Atlantic merchants", not modern industrial capitalists, as colonial ruling
class, and no hereditary landlord aristocracy. The Framers enacted a neo-feudal
counterrevolution in the State that could neither restore hereditary monarchy
nor expel the plebeian democracy from political society altogether in the
manner of 18th century Britain with the radical whig "commonwealthmen".
Finally, Venice did have a Doge as an elected executive who served for life.
The mode of election varied over time, but rested mainly in the hands of the
Maggiore Consiglio oligarchy. A second aside: The degree of ignorance of the
American commentariat can be found in the fact that nobody noted that Elon Musk
had named his White House wrecking ball operation D.O.G.E., let alone note that
"doge" is only the Venetian idiom for "duce" or duke. Musk is quite the
classicist, as earlier on his X sewer he had blurted out in typical four word
one line manner, "We need a Sulla". The conservative Optimate, Lucius
Cornelius Sulla, was the first commander to bring field legions into the city
of Rome in 83 BCE, launching the long series of class struggle civil wars that
brought down the republic and ended in the Principate of Caesar Augustus.
Unfortunately for Musk, Trump is no Sulla, as his "Mithridatic War" on Iran is
a complete military disaster! He appears rather as Marcus Licinius Crassus at
the battle of Carrhae against the Parthians, who annihilated the Romans with
their own version of arrow missile launchers on horseback. But the Venetian
Doge was no fascist "Il Duce", and followed a historical trajectory opposite
that of the US Presidency, as will be mentioned in Part II.
The 1787 Federal superstructure was indeed almost perfectly aligned with its
deeply mercantile and rural social basis. New York City was a mere 33,000
people in 1790, while the capital of the thoroughly feudal, if absolutist,
Tokugawa bakufu, Edo (modern Tokyo), stood at one million, with London, likely
the largest city in Europe, close on its heels at 900,000! The USA was founded
as the most perfect "bourgeois" city-dweller republic ever, indeed!
A survey of how the US state moved from an almost complete correspondence with
its social basis to an almost complete opposition with the same at present can
be found at https://chicxulub.substack. com/p/the-painted-face-of-us- politics
( https://chicxulub.substack.com/p/the-painted-face-of-us-politics ) as well as
in https://chicxulub.substack. com/p/all-in-a-matryoshka-doll (
https://chicxulub.substack.com/p/all-in-a-matryoshka-doll ) and
https://chicxulub. substack.com/p/the-way-out-of- the-matroshka (
https://chicxulub.substack.com/p/the-way-out-of-the-matroshka ). "The Painted
Face of U.S. Politics" halts at the door of the New Deal era. That era until
the present is still being researched for a Part II. A key thesis will be that
we still live within the New Deal political regime, and "neo-liberalism" is not
a regime change in an already liberal regime but a change in governance. The
Trump Gang clearly wants a regime change but highly likely will fail. All a
work in progress with concepts to be fine-tuned as required.
The foundation of the USA was also the era of the emergence of the "Industrial
Revolution" in Britain. The origins of industrial capitalism and the modern
proletariat are found in the Lancastrian finishing manufactures at the terminus
of the Indian cotton textile logistical chain, where these were prepared for
resale to Europe. The textiles came through Liverpool, and the whole trade had
been secured by the victory of Britain over France in India in the 1760's world
war. The Lancastrian manufacturers worked their way down the logistics chain by
importing slave picked raw cotton from the USA. Thus emerged William Blake's
satanic mills. This event began the transformation of Britain's social base
from that of household direct producers into a proletariat.
As with its antipode in the American Revolution, it is no accident that the
Industrial Revolution emerged after Britain's victory. Its effects extended
down to Birmingham's ironworking industry, but the new mode of production would
not spread across Britain until the advent of the railroad, uniting the
national market. All Brenner's antediluvian "agrarian capitalism" contributed
were its key condition: a surplus laboring population fed by an expanded
staples production. His thesis merely describes a process of so-called
"primitive accumulation". See Joseph E. Inikori's " Africans and the
Industrial Revolution in England" for details.
The new capitalist mode of production would not take hold in force in the USA
until the 1840's, and would not become the dominant mode of production until
after the railroad boom in the 1870's. Yet as late as 1950 some 40% of the US
population remained rural and small town. Only with the emergence of a mass
industrial proletariat did the US state at all levels begin to massify itself
bureaucratically, not only as counterweight to this new and generally hostile
class, but also as reaction to the expansion of the great metropolises where
the same working class tended to concentrate. Both were profoundly alien to
the original social basis upon which the State was founded.
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