Science and Society, April 2013 The American Path of Bourgeois Development Revisited by Daniel Gaido
(From the Haymarket author's page: "Gaido is a researcher at the National Research Council (Conicet) in Argentina. He is the author of The Formative Period of American Capitalism and is currently working on a book on the history of German social democracy." Conclusion "The American Road to Capitalism" is an attempt to apply to the United Sates Robert Brenner’s model of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England. According to Brenner, English landlords gave birth to capitalism in the countryside by turning their peasants into tenants in the early 16th century. Since in the United States there was no class of feudal landlords to act as prime movers of an “agrarian” capitalist development, Post makes the merchant-turned-land speculator the demiurge of American capitalism, asserting, against all historical evidence, that this class was able to “impose a social monopoly on land” shortly after the American revolution. The rest of Post’s theses on the American revolution, Southern plantation slavery, the Civil War and reconstruction are just elaborations of this fundamentally mistaken interpretation. What the historical record shows is that the two American bourgeois revolutions — a notion that Brenner, Post and their fellow “political Marxists” reject — actually facilitated access to the land at nominal prices for white settlers. This widespread landownership amounted to a form of land nationalization that created favorable conditions for capitalist development through the abolition of ground rent, which constitutes a precapitalist barrier to the development of the productive forces under capitalism. This, and the absence of an absolutist state bureaucracy, in turn fostered the generalization of commodity production in the countryside, creating a wide home market for the development of industry in the North, which eventually dominated the Union in the aftermath of the Civil War. That is what Lenin showed in his analysis of the American path of bourgeois development,” which remains the foundation of any materialist approach to American history. Due to the weakness of Marxism in the United States, progress in this field has consisted mostly in setting the “American path of bourgeois development” in its peculiar settler colonialist — i.e., white supremacist — context, but the peculiarities of American capitalist development, their impact on class struggles and, through them, the ways in which those peculiarities shaped American political history largely remain to be explored. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
