Re: Patrimonial Bonapartism, Part I: What Is "Pre-Capitalism?" Bradley Mayer's post is the most demanding thing anyone has put into this thread, and I have been sitting with it for a day. Let me start with what I got wrong.
I wrote that politically constituted property was the target of the English revolution. That overstates it, and his correction lands. The new merchants of the American and West Indian trades wanted state-backed commercial property of their own, on terms that did not run through the Stuart court, and when the union with the Dutch failed, they handed the thing to Cromwell. The narrower claim is the one I should have made: the faction whose wealth rested on Crown grant tells us nothing about the character of the domestic property regime, since its fortunes were made outside that regime entirely. Everything I need is in the narrower version. I reached past it. He is also right that Pocock and Williams give the 1787 settlement a genealogy that cannot be shrugged off and right that the American case is where I am thinnest. That one I will come to at length, because I cannot answer it by tightening a definition. Now the part I do not accept. Mayer's criterion is that the fundamental mark of pre-capitalism is "the absence of a mass industrial proletariat of sufficient weight to constitute the dominant class of direct producers." Sufficient weight. This is a threshold on a magnitude, and it is the same instrument Boynton handed me for Bonapartism when he proposed intensified relative autonomy as the test. I said then that a dial names no relation and cannot say why the thing it measures arises. Moving the dial from the state to the mode of production does not repair it. Identical demographic and commercial shocks in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries produced competitive leaseholds in England, peasant proprietorship in France, and the second serfdom east of the Elbe. Class weight cannot tell you why. And there is a snag internal to his own framing that I do not think he has noticed. He opens by insisting that the forces of production are in essence the mass of direct producers and only secondarily their technical composition and says so while dismissing the technological determinism charge. Then the whole sorting job in his criterion falls to the word industrial. Whether producers are compelled to reproduce themselves through the market is a question about a relation. Whether they work in mills is a question about technique. Britnell I am not going to argue with. Medieval England had deep markets, a great deal of coin, and money rents across the board by 1300, and the growth in circulation he cites is real. My difficulty is that none of it answers the question, which is what compels a producer. Commuted money rent is extraction secured by lordly jurisdiction. Customary tenure is non-market access to subsistence. A customary tenant owing a fixed sum can be squeezed by inflation, by seigneurial force, by entry fines, and by every dirty trick the manor court allowed, and he is still not obliged to outproduce his neighbor in order to keep his holding. The competitive leasehold imposes that obligation, and that is the whole hinge. Mayer half concedes it when he grants that the dissolution of servile incidents produced "variable regional outcomes," as Brenner has noted. "If the commerce was general and the outcomes were not, the commerce is the occasion. I am aware I have now made a version of this move to Boynton about deadlock, to Mark about exhaustion, and to Mayer about commercialization. Three times is close to a tic. I will try not to make it a fourth. Neo-Smithianism in one country is a good line, and I would like it better if it came with an argument. The charge stuck to Wallerstein because he defined the system by production for profit in a world market, which is a proposition about exchange. Brenner's market dependence is a proposition about how producers get access to their own conditions of reproduction. To convict him of the same sin, you would have to show the second collapsing into the first in the actual text. Mayer notes that book-length critiques exist and moves on. Two things for the record, since we are all working from memory here and I had to go check. The suggestion that Brenner abandoned the merchant line in favor of agrarian capitalism in one country has the sequence backwards. The agrarian argument ran in Past and Present in 1976. Merchants and Revolution appeared from Princeton in 1993, and its closing sections are an extended effort to hitch the two together. You can think that effort failed. You cannot call it an abandonment. The other is Bailyn, who did not lift Pocock in the 1950s. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution is 1967, and The Machiavellian Moment is 1975. What Bailyn, Pocock, and Gordon Wood have in common is Caroline Robbins, whose Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman came out in 1959 and is where the Commonwealthman genealogy actually enters this literature. I raise it because it inverts the story Mayer is telling. The republican synthesis was an American historiographical formation that Pocock joined and enlarged; it was not an English thesis imported and Americanized. Which brings me to the general problem with that whole line of argument, and I have already used it once in this thread against Boynton's regression thesis, so he can hold me to it. Pocock is marvelous intellectual history. Harrington read Machiavelli; Robbins found the Commonwealthmen; the Framers had Harrington and Contarini and Giannotti within reach. All of that establishes which vocabulary was available to men explaining themselves to themselves. It does not establish the property relations they were standing in while they did it. Musk christening the operation DOGE is the same thing in miniature, and Mayer's catch is a good one. A man who wants Sulla is telling you what he reads. The American case is different, and here I have to give ground. A ruling class of slaveholders and Atlantic merchants sitting on a countryside of household producers is the hardest terrain political Marxism has, and nothing I have written in this thread has gone anywhere near it. The answer that exists is Charles Post's, in The American Road to Capitalism, which came out in the Historical Materialism series in 2011 with a foreword by Ellen Meiksins Wood. Post's account has three moving parts. Plantation slavery is neither capitalist nor feudal but a distinct set of social property relations with a law of motion of its own. Northern household producers were not market-dependent for as long as squatting stayed a live option, because a state that cannot enforce speculators' land claims cannot compel anyone to buy. And what closed that option was political: after the Revolution the state acquired the administrative and military capacity to make land titles stick, farmers had to purchase and then carry war-debt taxation on top, and out of that came a stratum of self-employed producers under genuine market compulsion, which in turn generated the first domestic market for industrial goods. The Civil War arrives at the end as the political resolution between two property regimes that could not share a continent. Whatever one makes of it, an argument that the United States was founded as a pre-capitalist merchant republic has to go through that book, and Part I does not mention it. I want to underline the mechanism, because it is politically generated. The compulsion in Post comes from state capacity, not from the spread of markets. That sits awkwardly with the charge that this school dissolves production relations into exchange. Now the part I cannot resolve. Post's transformed northern farmers are petty commodity producers. They own their means of production. They mostly do not employ wage labor. So either market compulsion by itself is sufficient to make social property relations capitalist, or it describes some third thing that later gave way to capitalism, and I do not have a settled view about which. What I will say is that this does not rescue Mayer's criterion, since "does market compulsion suffice" is a question about a relation, and his was a question about the size of a class. But the difficulty is real, and it is his to press if he wants it. On the China thesis I will be short, having promised above not to repeat myself. Mayer offers it as the answer to the differentiation question I left with Boynton. The relative redundancy of old-core productive capacity is real, and it is general. Germany, Japan, France, and Canada are living through it, and none of them is producing what Washington is producing. One last item, which he presents as a concession extracted from Brenner and which I intend to pocket. Riley and Brenner's "Seven Theses on American Politics" ran in New Left Review at the end of 2022. Their term is political capitalism, and the claim is that a new regime of accumulation has emerged in which raw political power rather than productive investment is a key determinant of the rate of return. That is a periodization. It requires the distinction between the two sources of return in order to say that the balance between them has shifted. It is also within a hair of the criterion I put to Mark, that the patrimonial content of this state is generated by the rising share of profit dependent on political discretion. If Brenner got there by another road, fine. Marv Gandall's objection looks like the fatal one, and I do not think it is. Bonapartism never meant autonomy from the conditions of accumulation. Louis Bonaparte was not free of the Bourse. The autonomy in the Eighteenth Brumaire is autonomy from the political representation of the contending fractions, which is a different animal. Bond market discipline aggregates: how much can be borrowed, at what yield, and at what cost to the currency. They do not discipline distribution. Nothing in a rising ten-year tells you who gets the tariff exemption or the pardon or the procurement award. And read the Financial Times piece again. Treasury buybacks pressed against fundamentals, a federal equity position in Intel, winners and losers picked out of the listed market, and gifts arriving from executives in search of favor. That is a description of the object, not a refutation of it. Druckenmiller pleading to let the bond market speak is the demand for impersonality in its purest available form, which is precisely the opposition I have been saying we cannot let ourselves be recruited into. The constraint Marv names is real, and I think it is generative. An executive that cannot deliver general conditions of accumulation delivers particular exemptions instead. Tightening the aggregate constraint does not make the individual grant less valuable. Part II is where the Bonapartism argument lands, so I will hold. I will say that Cromwell is a more interesting candidate than anyone in this thread has yet allowed, and I am curious what Mayer does with him. Anthony P. Teso -- Tony -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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