The Brenner debate revisited

THE BRENNER DEBATE EXPLAINED 

 The Brenner Debate The agricultural revolution Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England witnessed an agricultural revolution which involved massive changes in land tenure, the organization of production on farms, the techniques employed in farming, and the productivity of agriculture. Thus the sixteenth century represented a sharp change in English rural life: the emergence of the capitalist farm in place of small-scale peasant cultivation, the intensification of market relations, increase in population, and eventual breakthrough to capitalist development in town and country. The social consequences of this revolution were massive as well: smallholding peasant farming gave way to larger capitalist farms; hundreds of thousands of displaced peasants were rapidly plunged into conditions of day labor, first in farming and then in manufacture in towns and cities; higher farm productivity permitted more rapid urbanization and the growth of an urban, commercialized economy; and higher real incomes provided higher levels of demand for finished goods which stimulated industrial development. Thus the agricultural revolution was the necessary prelude to the industrial revolution in England. [1] “It was the growth of agricultural productivity, rooted in the transformation of agrarian class or property relations, which allowed the English economy to embark upon a path of development foreclosed to its Continental neighbours. This path was distinguished by continuing industrialization and overall economic growth through the period when `general crisis' gripped the other European economies” (Brenner 1982:110). It was indeed, in the last analysis, an agricultural revolution, based on the emergence of capitalist class relations in the countryside which made it possible for England to become the first nation to experience industrialization [through higher levels of grain productivity and higher income to stimulate demand for industrial goods]. (Brenner 1976:68) This process poses at least two problems for historical explanation. First is an historical question: why did breakthrough occur in England in the sixteenth century and not the fifteenth or the nineteenth? And the second is geographic: why did this process of agricultural development occur in England but not on the Continent? In particular, why did agrarian life in the French countryside remain relatively unchanged throughout this period? And why did eastern Europe slide into a “second feudalism”? [2] A variety of explanations have been advanced for these developments. Some economic historians (e.g., M. M. Postan and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie) have maintained that the cause of this process of change was an autonomous increase in either population or commerce or both. Robert Brenner argues, however, that these explanations are inadequate, since these large-scale factors affected the whole of Western Europe, while capitalist breakthrough occurred only in Britain. Brenner holds that the determining factor is the particular character of social-property relations in different regions of Europe (particularly the conditions of land-tenure and associated forms of surplus extraction), the interests and incentives which these relations impose on the various actors, and the relative power of the classes defined by those relations in particular regions. Brenner's explanation of these developments is thus based on “micro-class analysis” of the agrarian relations of particular regions of Europe. The processes of agricultural modernization unavoidably favored some class interests and harmed others. Capitalist agriculture required larger units of production (farms); the application of larger quantities of capital goods to agriculture; higher levels of education and scientific knowledge; etc. All of this required expropriation of small holders and destruction of traditional communal forms of agrarian relations. Whose interests would be served by these changes? Higher agricultural productivity would result; but the new agrarian relations would be ones which would pump the greater product out of the control of the producer and into elite classes and larger urban concentrations. Consequently, these changes did not favor peasant community interests, in the medium run at least. It is Brenner's view that in those regions of Europe where peasant societies were best able to defend traditional arrangements--favorable rent levels, communal control of land, and patterns of small holding--those arrangements persisted for centuries. In areas where peasants had been substantially deprived of tradition, organization, and power of resistance, capitalist agriculture was able (through an enlightened gentry and budding bourgeoisie) to restructure agrarian relations in the direction of profitable, scientific, rational (capitalist) agriculture. <!--[if lt IE 6]> <![endif]

Saturday, January 2, 2010

The Brenner debate revisited

One of the defining controversies in the field of economic history in the past 35 years is the Brenner debate.  Robert Brenner published "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe" in Past and Present in 1976 (link) and "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism" in 1982.  In between these publications (and following) there was a rush of substantive responses from leading economic historians, including M. M. Postan and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.  (Many of the most significant articles are collected in Aston and Philpin's The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe.)  Brenner's theories injected important new impetus into the old question: what led to the advent of capitalism?  (Maurice Dobb had stimulated a similar burst of scholarship on this topic with his 1963 Studies In The Development Of Capitalism (link).  Brenner's discussion of the Dobb debate can be found in his essay, "Dobb on the transition from feudalism to capitalism" here.)

The core issue of the debate is large and important: what were the social factors that brought about the major economic transformations of the European economy since the decline of feudalism?  Feudalism was taken to be a stagnant economic system; but in the sixteenth century things began to change.  There was something of an agricultural revolution in England, with technological innovation, changes of cropping systems, and significant increase in land productivity.  There were the beginnings of manufacture, leading eventually to water- and steam-powered machines.  There was a population shift from the countryside to towns and cities.  There was industrial revolution.  (Marx describes much of this process in Capital; here's an earlier post of his concept of "primitive accumulation.")  So what were the large social factors that caused this widespread process of social and economic change?  What propelled these dramatic changes of economic structure?

The great economic historian M. M. Postan offered a simple theory: “Behind most economic trends in the middle ages, above all behind the advancing and retreating land settlement, it is possible to discern the inexorable effects of rising and declining population” (Medieval Economy and Society: An Economic History of Britain in the Middle Ages, p. 72).  Against this view, Brenner writes: "Under different property structures and different balances of power, similar demographic or commercial trends, with their associated patterns of factor prices, presented very different opportunities and dangers and thus evoked disparate responses, with diverse consequences for the economy as a whole. Indeed, . . . under different property structures and balances of class forces . . . precisely the same demographic and commercial trends yielded widely divergent results" (Brenner 1982:16-17).  Key to Brenner's argument is the fact that agricultural change was substantially different in England and France; so he insists that an adequate causal explanation must identify a factor that varies similarly.

From the distance of several decades, the dividing lines of the Brenner debate are pretty clear.  One school of thought (Postan, Ladurie) attempts to explain the economic transformations described here in terms of facts about population, while the other (Brenner's) argues that the central causal factors have to do with social institutions (social-property relations and institutions of political power). The demographic theory focuses its attention on the factors that influenced population growth, including disease; the social institutions theory focuses attention on the institutional framework within which economic actors (lords, peasants, capitalist farmers) pursue their goals.  The one is akin to a biological or ecological theory, emphasizing common and universal demographic forces; the other is a social theory, emphasizing contingency and variation across social space.

A voice that doesn't come into the debate directly but that is highly relevant is that of Douglass North. His book (with Robert Paul Thomas), The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History, offers a theory of modern economic development that falls within the category of "social institutional theory" rather than demographic theory.  But whereas Brenner finds primary causal importance in the institutions that define local class relations (a Marxian idea), North argues that property relations that create the right kinds of incentives will stimulate rapid economic growth (a Smithian idea). And North finds that this is the innovation that took place in England in the early modern period.  It was the creation of capitalist property relations that stimulated economic growth.

This schematic representation of the strands of argument in the Brenner debate suggests competing causal diagrams:

• population growth => economic activity => sustained economic growth (Postan)
• weak peasant farmers, strong capitalist farmers => enclosure and farming innovations => rapid agricultural growth (Brenner)
• enhanced protections of property rights => incentive for profitable activity => sustained economic growth (North)

But it seems clear in hindsight that these are false dichotomies. We aren't forced to choose: Malthus, Marx, or Smith.  Economic development is not caused by a single dominant factor -- a point that Guy Bois embraces in his essay (Aston and Philpin, 117).  Rather, all these factors were in play in European economic development -- and several others as well.  (For example, Ken Pomeranz introduces the exploitation of the natural resources, energy sources, and forced labor of the Americas in his account of the economic growth of Western Europe (The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy).  And I suppose that it would be possible to make a climate-change argument for this period of change as well.)  Moreover, each large factor (population, prices, property relations) itself is the complex result of a number of great factors -- including the others on the list.  So we shouldn't expect simple causal diagrams of large outcomes like sustained economic growth.

Not all the heat of this debate derives from a polemic between a neo-Marxist theorist and the Malthusians; there is also a significant disagreement between Brenner and another important Marxist economic historian, Guy Bois.  Bois' Crisis of Feudalism appeared in 1976 -- the same year as Brenner's first paper in the debate.  The crisis to which Bois refers is an analogy with a classic Marxist claim about capitalism: where Marx discerned a crisis in capitalism deriving from the falling rate of profit, Bois found a crisis in feudalism deriving from a falling rate of feudal levy.  (Here is an interesting review by Chris Harman of another of Bois' books, The Transformation of the Year One Thousand: The Village of Lournard from Antiquity to Feudalism.)  Bois criticizes Brenner's account for being excessively theory-driven.  He argues that Brenner begins with a commitment to class struggle as a fundamental explanation, and then forces the facts of French and English rural life into this framework.  Better, he argues, to let the complexity of the historical situations emerge through careful evaluation of the evidence.  "Brenner's thought is, in fact, arranged around a single principle: theoretical generalization always precedes direct examination of historical source material" (Aston and Philpin, 110).  And Bois argues that the evidence will suggest that it is the declining feudal levy rather than the capacity for resistance by French peasants that best explains the course of events in France.

In short, one important consequence of the Brenner debate was the renewed focus it placed on the question of social causation.  Brenner and the other participants expended a great deal of effort in developing theories of the causal mechanisms that led to economic change in this period.  And in hindsight, it appears that a lot of the energy in the debates stemmed from the false presupposition that it should be possible to identify a single master factor that explained these large changes in economic development.  But this no longer seems supportable.  Rather, historians are now much more willing to recognize the plurality of causes at work and the geographical differentiation that is inherent in almost every large historical process.  So the advice that Bois extends -- don't let your large theory get in the way of detailed historical research -- appears to be good counsel.

A web-based text for the philosophy of social sciences

• Foundations
• What is a social science?
• Ontological questions
• Social science disciplines
• Some debates about methodology
• Social explanation
• Social cognition
• Agency and collective action
• Identity and culture
• Causal mechanisms
• Structures and processes
• Institutions
• Power
• Materialism
• Historical explanation
• China

A WEB-BASED RESOURCE
The philosophy of social sciences raises a series of foundational questions having to do with how we can arrive at empirically and theoretically supported understandings of social and individual behavior. What is involved in explaining social outcomes and patterns? How do agents cause outcomes? What roles do social entities such as structures, organizations, or moral systems play in social causation?
My blog, UnderstandingSociety, addresses a series of topics in the philosophy of social science. What is involved in "understanding society"? The blog is an experiment in writing a book, one idea at a time. In order to provide a bit more coherence for the series of postings, I've organized a series of threads that link together the postings relevant to a particular topic. These can be looked at as virtual "chapters". This list of topics and readings can serve as the core of a semester-long discussion of the difficult philosophical issues that arise in the human sciences. It roughly parallels the topics I cover in the course I teach in the philosophy of social science at the University of Michigan.
Look at this web document as a web-based, dynamic monograph on the philosophy of social science; and look at this list of threads as one possible route through some foundational issues in the philosophy and methodology of social science.

© Daniel Little 2011

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Capitalists are Dispensable, Laborers Are Not

BY M. SHAHID ALAM

 DECEMBER 28, 2021Facebook

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Photograph Source: Mark Dixon – CC BY 2.0

“If you set to work to believe everything,
you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind,
and then you’ll be so weak you won’t be able
to believe the simplest true things.”

– Lewis Carroll

Capitalists—qua owners of capital—are dispensable, but laborers are not.

This thesis flows from a neglected asymmetry between capitalists and laborers. The capitalist does not stand in the same relation to capital and the services of capital as a laborer does with respect to his laboring capacities and the services of these capacities. This distinction goes unacknowledged by neoclassical economists as well as economists of other persuasions. If this is because they have concluded that this is of no consequence, we offer some arguments to the contrary.

There is irony in this thesis even as capitalism threatens to render laborers ‘useless,’ that is, replace them with intelligent machines faster than it creates new jobs. But this is not the place to address this irony.

Why are capitalists dispensable?

Consider a series of relations moving from a capitalist to his capital, and from capital to the services of capital. Next examine another series moving from a laborer to his laboring capacities, and from these capacities to the diverse services of these capacities, also known as the services of labor. There exist important differences between the two series.

There exists no integral—or, if you prefer, visceral—connection between the capitalist and his capital or between the capitalist and the services of capital. Capital and the services of capital are wholly external to the capitalist qua owner of capital; their relationship to the capitalist is merely legal so that a capitalist can be physically separated from his capital and the services of his capital. If the capitalist prefers leisure to work or lacks the requisite managerial skills, he can delegate the task of running his enterprise to hired managers. Once the capitalist appoints a manager to run his enterprise, he could be soaking the sun inside one of the many craters on the moon while his enterprise continues to produce goods or services somewhere in Agawam, Massachusetts. All this notwithstanding, at the end of every year or every quarter, this capitalist will receive the profits or carry the losses of his enterprise. This is his return for risking his funds to organize production.

Now consider an economy whose capital has been transferred to the workers in each enterprise. The workers in each enterprise form a worker-cooperative; they collectively own its capital, vote to elect a workers’ council who then appoint managers, or elect the managers directly. In addition, each WC is free to borrow funds from deposit banks or tax-funded investment banks. Each WC is also free to sell some fraction of its fixed capital should this not be needed; the proceeds from this sale may be used to pay off loans, deposited in a bank as a reserve fund against rainy days, or allocated to research and development.

Each worker cooperative may choose its modus vivendi and its goals. At first, therefore, a variety of worker cooperatives may emerge, with different goals and structures; they may be more or less egalitarian; some may work primarily with fixed wages, others with a combination of fixed wages and shares in the coop’s residual. Some may give greater weight to steady employment, others to higher wages. It is difficult to say, which types of cooperatives may emerge as winners. Collectively, the cooperatives may set some limits to the goals, and the governance and the reward structures of the coops to ensure the viability of the system as a whole.

In one stroke then, we have created a market economy without any capitalists as the term is understood in a capitalist economy. Production in this economy is organized by worker cooperatives, whose policies are formulated by a management periodically elected by workers. The workers in each enterprise are free to set the rules under which they work; they are also free to leave one WC and join another. However, the capital of any enterprise is not traded, nor does it move when any worker leaves the enterprise.

In a splendid piece of circular reasoning, neoclassical economists justify private ownership of capital on the ground that it is the capitalist who organizes production. This is a non sequitur. The capitalist organizes production precisely because he is a capitalist: he commands his own or borrowed funds that allow him to do so. In an economy consisting of worker cooperatives, teams of workers could organize production with funds borrowed from deposit banks or tax-funded investment banks.

It may be argued that the co-ops cannot match the performance of corporations because they have no skin in the game. This is not true. Unlike workers who receive fixed wages, the members of WCs may receive all or some fraction of their income that is tied to their co-op’s residual. Since they share in the coop’s decision-making, co-op members are more likely than wage-workers to identify with their enterprise. In themselves, these factors may help to reduce shirking. In addition, shirkers in co-ops are likely to come under moral censure from non-shirkers. If free-riding is seen as a problem, the WCs can empower the management to monitor the performance of members and work out rules for dismissing habitual shirkers. Collectively, co-ops may discourage shirking by discounting the earnings of new members who have a record of shirking. Shirkers may also be given the chance to expunge their record by improving their performance.

Since the capitalist is physically separable from his capital, this creates the possibility of separating ownership of capital in an enterprise from control over it. In medieval times, we observe trade partnerships in the Middle East—known as qirad in Arabic—where some partners advanced capital to traders who managed the task of conducting the trade. In 1932, Adolph Berle and Gardiner Means showed that ownership and control of most large-scale enterprises in the United States had ceased to reside in the same hands.

In activities without significant economies of scale and high costs of supervision, the capitalist may lend and/or rent his capital to workers and let them organize production. In agriculture, we find landlords who rent their lands to peasants instead of hiring wage-workers to organize production. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, capitalists in Britain set up textile factories with work benches that workers could rent to produce yarn and cloth on their own account. It is also common for laborers lacking capital to rent cars, trucks and rickshaws to produce transport services. Others rent space in commercial buildings to organize retail businesses.

A laborer cannot be physically separated from his working capacities or the services of his working capacities.

A laborer’s working capacities include his body, the metabolism that converts food into energy, his cognitive powers, memory, will, emotions, skills, intuition, and his powers of reasoning, sight, speech, hearing, taste and touch. The execution of any task by a worker in real time—whether this entails digging a trench, a sitar recital, performing surgery, crafting a violin, or time spent solving a yet unsolved mathematical conundrum—is the joint product of various manifestations or services of his working capacities.

Under a wage-contract, however, a laborer may sell the services of his working capacities to an employer. In addition, a self-employed person with access to some capital may employ his working capacities to produce services (such as haircuts) that he sells directly to buyers. Alternatively, as a carpenter, he may employ his working capacities to saw, bend, carve, plane, sand, screw together, and polish timber into chairs, and then sell the chairs for a profit. In both cases, the laborer, will likely receive the market wage for his labor and a similar return on the capital he employs in his enterprise.

Some exceptions to the inseparability of a laborer from his laboring capacities may also be noted. If medical technology permits, he may sell or donate his organs or tissues for transplantation to another person. However, a person is unlikely to consent to such transplantations, except when this promises to save the life of a loved one. Of course, without the living person’s consent, or after he dies or is killed, the possibilities become endless.

The first asymmetry we have just described leads to another. 

The separability of the capitalist from his capital nudges us to explore egalitarian re-arrangements of the ownership of capital. Should such rearrangements occur, the capitalists will only lose their claim to the surplus of capitalist enterprises, but they will retain all their rights as citizens and as members of WCs in the new economy. Should they also possess some valuable skills, the WCs will recognize and reward these skills without any prejudice arising from their past history as capitalists.

On the other hand, a laborer cannot be separated from his laboring capacities without also losing his freedom. The capitalist can take ownership of the laboring capacities of legally free laborers only after he takes ownership of their persons for some part of a day, that is, by turning them into wage-slaves.

Importantly, the absence of any integral or visceral connection between the capitalist and his capital points to the potential for reorganizing the ownership of capital on an egalitarian basis. It would be disingenuous to think that the capitalists themselves are not aware of this potential for egalitarian rearrangements of the ownership of capital. In addition, we may surmise that the capitalists know that the workers too—perhaps, with help from their protagonists in the intellectual classes—are aware of this vulnerability.

Given all of the above, we may surmise that capitalists have always been at work—no doubt with help from self-serving economists—to obfuscate this vulnerability and, simultaneously, to harness the coercive powers of the state to protect their pivotal position in the capitalist system. Since the actual use of coercion is costly, the capitalists employ all the forces at their command to convince the workers of the superiority of an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production. However, should the workers start questioning this ‘natural order,’ the capitalists are prepared to call on the machinery of the state—especially the courts, police and prisons—to knock the workers until they back the capitalist narrative.

Which of the two classes—capitalists or workers—is likely to organize production in a capitalist economy? 

In the 1950s, after nearly a century of mathematical ‘modling,’ neoclassical economists concluded that they had worked out the contours of an imaginary economy that would serve as the ideological fortress of capitalism. Markets in this economy instantaneously reach an equilibrium that is unique, stable and efficient in the sense that no person can be made better off without making at least one person worse off. Capital and labor in this economy receive their just deserts: that is to say, there is no exploitation of labor. In the words of Paul Samuelson, in this economy “it really did not matter who hires whom; so have labor hire ‘capital.’”

The message of the neoclassicals to the capitalists is: Don’t let your hard work as bosses give you a bad conscience. It gives you no advantage. The message to the workers is: Why bother with organizing production; let the capitalists worry about this. Enjoy your hassle-free life as workers; you have nothing to gain from losing your chains. These charming results hold only in perfectly competitive markets in which capitalists can costlessly write and enforce complete employment contracts.

In the real world, however, production is nearly always organized by capitalist bosses. Hurling what he thinks is a challenge to Karl Marx,  David Landes asks “if [capitalist] bosses make (cream off) so much money, why shouldn’t boss-free enterprises (cooperatives, collectives, small self-employed workers, and the like) be able to outdo those capitalistic units that pay so heavy a toll to owners and managers?” Landes imagines that he is setting up a test of the feasibility of workers organizing production. He is challenging boss-free enterprises to organize production in capitalist economies under property rights, institutions and rules established by capitalists. Now, since worker co-ops do not—with rare exceptions—organize production in capitalist economies, this supposedly ‘proves’ that they cannot compete with capitalists in organizing production.

Landes forgets that workers cannot organize production because they have been stripped of the means of production. Since they cannot offer any collateral, they also cannot borrow money or rent capital. Moreover, financing the establishment of WCs is not only a financial issue. The economic and political power of capitalists is built around their class monopoly over production. Why would they dilute this class monopoly by lending capital to workers? It is unlikely that capitalist guilt over exploitation of workers ever reaches the point at which they become willing to commit hara-kiri.

Is the separation of capitalists from capital unjust?

Can any economic system be considered just that has a tendency to place—and often ends up placing—the means of production in the hands of a tiny minority of capitalists, thereby endowing them with the power to organize production not in the interests of the workers or society but exclusively in the interests of the capitalists. Depending on conditions in the labor market, and driven by the profit imperative, the capitalist may hire and fire workers at will. In addition, he may demand that his hired hands put in long hours of work, six days a week, quicken their pace of work to keep up with the machines, and take no breaks in the workplace, even if they have to piss in a bottle or wear diapers.

In a capitalist economy, moreover, workers are disposable, unless they have acquired skills specific to the enterprise in which they work; they may be laid off or fired whenever they are not needed. Can an economic system be just that nearly always fails to provide some workers with employment, and during a depression may fail to provide employment to as much as a third of the workers; when it does provide employment, many of these jobs may not offer the workers a living wage. Can an economic system be humane whose commitment to profit-making demands that workers be fired when they fall sick or are injured even when the sickness and injury are caused by hazards of the work and the workplace? It is ironic that while wage-workers in capitalist economies are legally free and wage-work is considered to be superior to slavery, the capitalists do not have any intrinsic interest in the livelihood and health of their workers that slave-owners have in their slaves and their families.

Similarly, while wage-workers are legally free, they lose their freedom the moment they enter the workplace. The neoclassical economist will predictably protest that a wage-worker remains free even at work since he is free to leave his present job whenever he wishes; if he does not quit that is because he chooses to stay. Sorry: this is a flawed inference. The neoclassical economist is always liberal in making assumptions; when he needs a can opener he just assumes that he has one. Hence, neoclassical economics assumes that workers face no costs in moving to another job that he prefers over his current job.

However, the ability to switch jobs at will does not overcome the lack of freedom at the workplace. A worker cannot escape the lack of freedom at the workplace because this is an unavoidable condition of capitalist employment, unless the nature of a job makes monitoring of work very costly. The lack of freedom at work cannot be blamed on technology; the capitalists have been choosing technology, layout of factories and offices, and work organization that truncate worker autonomy. Bosses can monitor their employees’ pace of work, even when they work remotely.

Conservatives and liberals are likely to view with alarm any talk about the rearrangement of capitalist property rights in the means of production.

Although such alarm is to be expected from the historical beneficiaries of capital accumulation over the last half a millennium, this shows societal amnesia about the horrendous crimes against humanity that attended, and still attend, the expropriation of great masses of humans—men, women, children and the unborn—to finance and support the creation of capitalists and capitalist power in Western Europe and North America. Karl Marx applied the moniker of ‘primitive accumulation’ to the “historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.”

The capitalist organization of British agriculture, which began in the late fifteenth century, was accomplished over the next three centuries through successive expropriations of the peasantry either by force or through laws passed by the largest landowners—formerly feudal lords—in the British parliament. The free peasantry that had emerged in England by the late fourteenth century earned a living from cultivating strips of arable land, but they also depended crucially on access to commons for firewood, pasturing their cattle, gathering berries and mushrooms, and catching game and fish. Once the growth of woolen manufactures in Flanders raised the price of wool, English landowners began to privatize the commons, either by force or passing enclosure acts that denied peasants access to the commons, and converted them into sheep pastures; this forced some peasants to seek wage-work in agriculture, while others abandoned their lands to seek wage-work in the towns. In addition, the large landowners also began to enforce gaming laws to ride roughshod over the farms of peasants resulting in losses to their crops.

Next consider a historical rearrangement of property rights during the nineteenth century that is more germane to the subject of this essay. I am referring to the large-scale separation—in the Americas during the nineteenth century—of a very important class of capitalists from their capital invested in slaves. In August 1791, the black slaves in Saint-Domingue—a French colony that was a source of immense profits to France—began a successful rebellion against slave-owning capitalists—who after defeating two massive invasions ordered by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1801 and 1802, declared the establishment in 1804 of the Republic of Haiti ruled by former black slaves. Do we object to this transfer of property rights in slaves from plantations owners to the slaves themselves?

In the nineteenth century, we encounter several more examples of the separation of capitalists from their capital invested in slaves. In 1833, Britain transferred the ownership rights of capitalists in humans to the humans themselves in nearly all its colonial possessions. Some of the northern states in the USA, following the War of Independence in 1776, began passing laws that effected similar transfers of ownership rights in slaves. In 1861, in the midst of the American Civil War, slavery was also abolished in the Southern States. Brazil, perhaps the largest slave-based economy in history, abolished slavery in 1888. In general, where slavery was abolished under law, the cash compensation was less than the market value of the slaves.

The principal results of this essay are easily summarized.

The capitalist is physically separable from the capital that he owns, but the laborer cannot be parted from his laboring capacities.

The first part of the previous statement establishes the feasibility of separating the capitalist from his capital. Indeed, the capitalist (qua capitalist) is a rentier since he does not contribute the services of any of his present working capacities to the enterprise in which he owns capital. The capitalist’s claim to profits is rooted in a legal relationship, not an economic relationship.

Au contraire, the services of a laborer are inseparable from his person. This means that in order to maximize his profits, the capitalist who hires labor must gain control over the laborer’s person and his working capacities in the workplace and—if necessary and feasible—off the workplace. In other words, the capitalist logic demands that the laborer be stripped of his autonomy once he enters the workplace. Although the worker is free in theory to choose his employer, this freedom does not restore the autonomy that he enjoyed in his work and workplace as a self-employed peasant, artisan, peddler or shopkeeper.

A clear-eyed focus on the asymmetry in the two binaries—the separability of the capitalist from capital and inseparability of the laborer from his working capacities—suggests significant gains that are likely to flow from an alternative organization of production that transfers ownership and control over capital from capitalist enterprises to worker cooperatives.

A detailed discussion of these gains is a subject for another essay. However, broadly speaking, these gains are likely to flow from two forms of democratization that will attend the transfer of capital from the capitalists to the workers. First, there is the political democratization that will flow from the transformation of the capitalist enterprises to worker cooperatives. A political system that grows out of the interests and actions of workers and worker co-ops is unlikely to be hijacked by sectional interests.

Secondly, there is the democratization in the workplace. A variety of benefits are likely to flow to workers from the establishment of co-ops. These may include sharing by members in policy-making, creation of a culture of egalitarianism, improvements in working conditions, equal access of all members and their families to education, health and social services, less hierarchy in the organization of work, sharing and phasing out of tedious work, and greater income inequality. An economy consisting of worker co-ops will nurture cooperation, in the workplace and outside it. Once profits are dethroned as the only or chief objective driving production and technological change, the economy will have a chance to redirect its focus from endless capital accumulation towards a thousand improvements in the quality of life for everyone.

M. SHAHID ALAM is professor of economics at Northeastern University. This is an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism (Macmillan, November 2009). Contact me at alqalam02760@yahoo.com.

Was Marx eco-socialist ?: An answer to Kohei Saito": Daniel Tanuro

01/27/2020Leave a commentGo to comments

Kohei Saito's book “Marx's ecosocialism” is an essential contribution to the ongoing debates on Marxism and the environmental issue 1 / .

What makes Kohei Saito's work particularly interesting is that it traces the evolution of Marx's thinking from a "productivist" view to an "antiproductivist" view of human development, incorporating in particular the natural limits to the perspectives of agriculture. This historical approach allows the author to transcend disputes between Marxists who see Marx's ecology as an empty glass, half empty, half full or full.

Thanks to a careful reading of Notebooks (Notebooks) Marx, Saito brilliantly shows how Marx abandoned the idea that agricultural productivity could increase indefinitely under socialism to arrive, in 1865-1868, to the opposite conclusion that only socialism it could stop the absurd and destructive capitalist tendency to unlimited growth.

John Bellamy Foster, in his book "Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature", highlighted the impact of Liebig's work on Marx's understanding of the problem of soil depletion 2 / . A the like Foster, Kohei Saito found that perturbation of the exchange of matter between humanity and nature ( metabolic rift ), caused by the combined processes of enclosures ( enclosures ), capitalist industrialization, urbanization and breaking the cycle of nutrients resulting from the above, it is a fundamental concept of the "ecology of Marx".

But Saito goes further: it shows that Marx, because he still believed in the unlimited potential of agricultural production, was initially interested in Liebig because the German chemist offered arguments against Ricardo's "law of diminishing returns" and against the "theory of absolute overpopulation ”of Malthus. However, Liebig himself, in the seventh edition of his "Agricultural Chemistry", distanced himself from his overly optimistic positions, "recognized that there are natural limits to agricultural improvements" and concluded that fertilizers could not compensate "predatory agriculture ”( Robbery agriculture ).

"Liebig did not highlight his change of position," says Saito. But Marx was so focused on the debate about the (non) proportionality between agricultural productivity and capital investment "that this hidden modification did not escape him." On the contrary, he commented that "the [Liebig's] new formulation implied a critical point of view on agriculture subject to gains from capitalist relations, incapable of improving the soil in a lasting and long-term way."

For Saito, the turning point of the German chemist was "decisive" for Marx's break with productivism. Hence the fact that this break occurred "relatively late", beginning in 1865. "In the London Notebooks , writes Saito, Marx's Promise is still discernible, but, by integrating Liebig's turn, he corrected, during the 1860s, his own optimistic vision of the possibilities of agriculture ”.

Of course, Marx did much more than correct his vision on the basis of Liebig's work. The chemist was a great scientist, but also an industrialist who produced fertilizers for profit. He had no historical or social understanding of soil depletion. Marx, on the contrary, immediately perceived the parallelism between the exploitation of labor and the destruction of nature by capital. From that moment, he saw the two phenomena as a common result of mediating by the abstract value of relationships between people, as well as between people and their environment.

Kohei Saito rightly insists on the general importance, in Capital , of the concept of "breakdown of metabolism" humanity / nature. Although Marx concentrated on agriculture and other sectors that directly exploit natural resources (forestry, for example), it is obvious that, for him, the concept transcends the problem of soil depletion to include all exchanges of materials (Stoffwechsel) between humanity and its environment. Agriculture is a starting point, because Marx gave a greater theoretical interest to the question of income and saw enclosures (enclosures) as "the great rupture" of the relations between humanity and nature.

We can only approve of Saito when he emphasizes that Marx saw the "breakdown of metabolism" as a global phenomenon, compounded in particular by the imperialist plunder of colonized countries, such as India and Ireland, for example. Therefore, Marx was aware that the nutrients included in Indian cotton made in British factories would never return to the soils where cotton had grown. This is another example showing that "Marx did not integrate Liebig's theory passively but very actively, applying it to his own political analysis."

Saito's historical approach to the evolution of Marx's thinking regarding the subject of natural limits is similar to that used by Kevin Anderson in his book “Marx in the Antipodes”, dedicated to non-western societies, another area in the that the opinions of the author of Capital changed significantly 3 / . For Saito there is a link between these two fields of research because Marx, in his Promethean period, "attributed the depletion of soils to the technological and moral backwardness of the so-called primitive agricultural techniques." In this regard, it is undoubtedly probable that "the Marxist critique of modernity deepens as he investigates the natural sciences in 1865", as Saito says.

Based on his careful study of Marx's Notebooks , Kohei Saito argues that Marx tempered his enthusiasm for Liebig after 1868. The reasons could be two-fold: on the one hand, Marx could not but oppose the development of Malthusian tendencies in the Liebig's thought; on the other hand, he discovered the work of other scientists, particularly those of Fraas, who defended the idea that nature, under certain climatic and alluvial conditions, could compensate for the loss in the soil of the nutrients absorbed by plants.

For Fraas, Liebig "increased the risk of soil depletion, in order to popularize his theory on the mineral amendment." In addition, Fraas also supported the idea that agriculture, because it involves deforestation, causes local climatic changes that, in the long term, will cause the decline of civilization. It is clear that such a theory must have stimulated Marx's reflection on the conditions for a "rational management" of people / nature metabolism.

Saito's concept of an "unfinished critique of political economy", particularly in the field of ecology, creates a suitable framework for debates among Marxists, not only on the evaluation of Marx's works but also on the fields of Research that must be opened to continue the elaboration of an ecosocialist alternative.

I leave aside Saito's criticism of my own work on the subject “Marx and ecology”. According to Saito, "Daniel Tanuro argues that the Marx era is now so distant in terms of technology and natural science that his theory is not appropriate for a systematic analysis of current environmental problems, in particular because Marx did not pay enough attention to the specificities of fossil energy compared to other forms of renewable energy. " Criticism is so inconsistent with my writings for more than 20 years that a response is superfluous .. 4 / .

In my opinion, there is something like an "ecology of Marx", but it is incomplete and sometimes contradictory. If I really appreciate "Marx's ecosocialism", it is precisely because Saito offers a dynamic, historical and, consequently, non-apologetic explanation of this incomplete and contradictory character. Furthermore, he gives this explanation without falling into the Althusserian theory (false, in my opinion) of the so-called "epistemological break" in the development of Marx's thought.

It is true that eco-socialists have different opinions about the degree of incompleteness and contradictions in Marx's ecology. At the end of his chapter "Capital as a theory of metabolism", Saito dedicates some pages to the "contradiction of capital in nature". I generally agree with the content of this text, but it essentially consists of a (re) construction of Marx's ecology by Saito himself. I admit that Marx could have eventually written something like that at the end of his life. But it did not, most likely because it was not confronted with the global ecological crisis.

Saito says that Marx "did not elaborate on the waste of natural resources in as much detail as on the cruel exploitation of the labor force." It is the least that can be said, indeed. Therefore, in my opinion, it is exaggerated and counterproductive to affirm that Marx would have analyzed "the problem of the ecological crisis as the central contradiction of the capitalist mode of production".

It seems to me preferable to consider the "ecology of Marx" as an unfinished field of work. The practical question, therefore, is: "What must we, as ecosocialists, do to continue the work?" Obviously, the priority is to apply the genius concept of capitalist breakdown of metabolism to ecological imbalances other than soil depletion, which Marx focused on. As far as I know, the possibility of a global energy imbalance in the Earth system, due to the burning of fossil fuels, did not attract his attention. It would have been otherwise - John Tyndall discovered radiative forcing of the CO _²and other atmospheric gases in 1859. But Marx's interest in science focused primarily on other areas of research. (Let's add that Fraas was talking about local climate changes caused by deforestation, not global warming.)

But the most important ecosocialist task is clearly to identify new fields of research, feeding new programmatic elaborations. In my opinion, three areas are particularly fertile from an ecosocialist point of view.

The first is the deep connection between the exploitation of nature, the exploitation of work, and the oppression of women by patriarchy. Marx's formula (in Capital ) on "the only two sources of wealth, nature and the worker", does not take into account either the reproductive work carried out mainly by women, or the specific exploitation of salaried women. Now, this specific exploitation and oppression constitute a pillar of capitalism, as important as the exploitation of nature and of labor in general.

The second area is the necessary break with scientism. This is an important question because scientism had an influence on Marx (and even more so on the Marxists of the 20th century). As an example of this influence, I have already mentioned the fact that Marx considered the idea that certain plants could fix nitrogen from the air in soils as a fable. Saito replies that "it is expedient to criticize Marx on this point": what Marx rejected as a fable, according to him, was not the possibility of this mechanism, but Lavergne's idea that it could favor crop growth in the short term. However, I maintain my interpretation. In my opinion, there is little doubt that Marx, in this quote, expresses disdain for what he considers superstitions of the peasants (and of the indigenous peoples). 5 / ), but the peasant knowledge did not attract the attention of Marx (who, on the other hand, was very aware of the knowledge of the artisans).

The third area is the place and role of peasants in contemporary capitalism. Marx thought that the peasants were condemned to disappear by the evolution of capital, but the reality has been different. Due to the gap (identified by Marx) between production time and labor time in agriculture, capital has chosen rather not to invest directly in agriculture in the strict sense, but to control it indirectly, upstream (machines, seeds, etc.) and downstream (processing, distribution, etc.). The result of this process is that a large fraction of the peasantry (and even more the "landless peasants") does not act as an intermediate class that oscillates between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but rather as a layer opposed to the multinationals. and to financial capital. This is how peasants often play a leading role in eco-socialist struggles, as we see in the action of Via Campesina. The strategic consequences of this situation should be carefully discussed by the ecosocialist movement.

In German Ideology , Marx and Engels defined communism as "the real movement that abolishes the present state of affairs." They added that "the conditions for this movement are the result of the premises that currently exist." Because they define "Marx's" ecosocialism "as an" unfinished critique of political economy "and underline the general direction of its development, the works of Kahei Saito constitute a powerful invitation for ecosocialists to unite to debate and collaborate in the elaboration of a new eco-communist program.

01/07/2020

https://www.gaucheanticapitaliste.org/marx-etait-il-ecosocialiste/

Translation: Faustino Eguberri for south wind

Notes:

1 / Kohei Saito, «Karl Marx's Ecosocialism. Capital, Nature and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy », Monthly Review Press, 2017.

2 / John Bellamy Foster, "The Ecology of Marx: Materialism and Nature", The Old Mole 2004.

3 / Kevin Anderson, “Marx aux antipodes”, (Marx in the antipodes) ed. Syllepse, 2015

4 / See, for example, DANIEL TANURO, “Marx, Mandel et les limites naturelles” in Contretemps, No. 20, September 2007.; DANIEL TANURO, “Pour une reconstruction écologique du marxisme”, IIRE, 2012. Available on the Web: < http://www.4edu.info/images/6/61/8-FR-Cover_merged.pdf >. (Different texts by Daniel Tanuro is peden consult Spanish in https://vientosur.info/spip.php?page=busqueda-avanzada&lang=es&formulaire_action=buscar_autor&formulaire_action_args=OQenuEpztkBzxDTvQHUjCGjO99MLiaF3Fx601TB9rB0KSG4WuHjvY64HOJoHkMoFQqQMdigVfmvS8w%3D%3D&lang=es&autor=tanuro ndt)

5 / Charles Darwin, "La Formation de la terre végétale par l'action des vers de terre" Available on the Web: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Livre:Darwin_-_R%C3%B4le_des_vers_de_terre_dans_la_formation_de_la_terre_v%C3% A9g% C3% A9tale.djvu (“The formation of the upper layer of the soil by the action of earthworms”)

"Marx and Ecosocialism": Michael Löwy

07/15/2019

[Book review  Karl Marx's Ecosocialism - Capitalism, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy,  Kohei Saito, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017, 308 pages].

Mainstream ecologists often dismiss Karl Marx as being  productivist  and blind to ecological problems. A growing body of ecomarxist writing has recently developed in the United States that clearly contradicts this commonplace.

The pioneers of this new line of research were John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, followed by Ian Angus, Fred Magdoff and others. They contributed to turning the  Monthly Review  into an ecomarxista magazine. His main argument is that Marx was well aware of the destructive consequences of capitalist accumulation for the environment, a process that he described with the concept of metabolic gap. Some of his interpretations of Marx's writings may be in disagreement, but his research was decisive for a new understanding of his contribution to the ecological critique of capitalism.

Kohei Saito is a young Japanese Marxist academic who is part of this important eco-Marxist school. His book, published by Monthly Review Press, is a valuable contribution to the reevaluation of the Marxist legacy from an ecosocialist perspective. 

Reset unit

One of the great qualities of Saito's work is that, unlike many other scholars, he does not treat Marx's writings as a systematic whole, defined from start to finish by his strong ecological commitment (according to some) or a marked tendency non-ecological (according to others). As Saito very convincingly points out, there are elements of continuity in Marx's reflection on nature, but also some very significant changes and reorientations. Furthermore, as the book's subtitle suggests, his critical reflections on the relationship between political economy and the natural environment are  unfinished .

Among the continuities, one of the most important is the question of the   capitalist separation of humans from earth, that is, from nature. Marx understood that in precapitalist societies there had been a form of unity between producers and land. It saw the restoration of the original unity between humanity and nature, destroyed by capitalism, but on a higher level (negation of negation), as one of the main tasks of socialism. This explains Marx's interest in precapitalist communities, both in his ecological debate (for example, on Carl Fraas) and in his anthropological research (Franz Maurer): both authors were perceived as "unconscious socialists".

In his last important document, the letter to Vera Zasúlich (1881), Marx affirms that, thanks to the suppression of capitalism, modern societies could return to a superior form of the archaic type   of collective property and production. I think this is part of a romantic anti-capitalist moment   in Marx's reflections. In any case, this interesting approach of Saito is very relevant today, when the indigenous communities of America, from Canada to Patagonia, form the first line of resistance to the capitalist destruction of the environment.

Evolution of thought

However, Saito's main contribution is in showing the movement, the evolution of Marx's reflections on nature, in a process of learning, rethinking and reformulating his ideas. Before  Capital (1867) we can find in Marx's writings a rather uncritical assessment of   capitalist progress , an attitude often described by the vague mythological term of  Prometheanism . This is evident in the passage of  the Communist Manifesto  that celebrates the "submission of natural forces by the hand of man" and the "breaking of entire continents" thanks to capital; but it is also applicable to  London Notebooks (1851), to the economic manuscripts of 1861-1863 and to other writings of those years.

Interestingly, from my point of view, Saito seems to exempt the  Grundrisse  (1857-1858) from his criticism. This exception is not justified, taking into account the extent to which Marx admires in this manuscript "the great civilizing mission of capitalism" in relation to nature and to pre-capitalist communities, prisoners of its localism and its "idolatry of nature" (! ).

The change occurred in 1865-1866, when Marx discovered, reading the writings of the agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig, the problems of soil depletion and the metabolic gap between human societies and their natural environment. This will give rise, in volume I of  Capital  (1867), as well as in the other two unfinished volumes, to a much more critical assessment of the destructive nature of   capitalist progress , particularly in agriculture. After 1868, by reading another German scientist, Carl Fraas, Marx will also discover other important ecological issues, such as deforestation and local climate change.

According to Saito, if Marx had been able to complete Volumes II and III of  Capital , he would have insisted more on the ecological crisis. This also implies, at least, that in the unfinished state in which Marx left these volumes he does not insist enough on these questions. This brings me to my main disagreement with Saito. In several passages of the book he affirms that for Marx "the environmental unsustainability of capitalism is the contradiction of the system" (p. 142); or that in his last years of life he considered that the metabolic gap is "the most serious problem of capitalism"; or that the conflict with natural limits is, for Marx, "the main contradiction of the capitalist mode of production".

I wonder where Saito found, among all of Marx's writings, published books, manuscripts, or notebooks, such claims. It is impossible to find them, and for good reason. In the 19th century, the unsustainability of the capitalist system was not the decisive issue that it has become today, or to be more precise, since 1945. Ian Angus rightly points out that it was then that human activity began to constitute the dominant factor in the configuration of the planetary environment. Consider that it was then that the planet entered a new geological era, the  anthropocene .

Furthermore, I believe that the metabolic gap, or the conflict with natural limits, is not correctly classified as a "problem of capitalism" or "contradiction of the system". Is much more! It is a contradiction between the system and the "eternal natural conditions" (Marx), and therefore a conflict with the natural conditions of human life on the planet.

In fact, as Paul Burkett (quoted by Saito) puts it, capital can continue to accumulate in any state of nature, however degraded it may be, as long as human life has not been totally extinguished. Indeed, human civilization can disappear before capital accumulation becomes impossible.

Saito concludes his book with a sober assessment that seems to me a very accurate summary of the question:  Capital  (the book) is an unfinished project. Marx did not answer all questions nor did he predict today's world. But his critique of capitalism constitutes an extremely useful theoretical basis for understanding the current ecological crisis. That is why, I would add, elecosocialism can be inspired by Marx's ideas, but it must develop a new ecomarxist vision when facing the challenges of the anthropocene in the 21st century.

Source: South Wind