THE_BRENNER_DEBATE._Agrarian_Class_Structure_
and_Economic_Development_in_Pre-Industrial_Europe
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This article was published in ANTIPODE: A RADICAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHY, 26,4,(1994):351-76.
J.M. BLAUT University of Illinois at Chicago
Euro-Marxism
Robert Brenner is a Marxist, a follower of one tradition in Marxism that is as diffusionist, as Eurocentric, as most conservative positions. I cannot here offer an explanation for this curious phenomenon: a tradition within one of the most egalitarian of all socio-political doctrines yet a tradition which, nonetheless, believes in the historical superiority (or priority) of one community of humans, Europeans, over another, non-Europeans. Eurocentric Marxists are not racist, nor even prejudiced, although most of them believe that Europeans have always been the leaders in the forward march of history; that Europe is the fountainhead of civilization, the main source of innovative social change. For these scholars, the origins of capitalism are European. Capitalism's further development consisted of an internally generated process of improvement within its classic homeland, the European world. The impact of capitalism on the rest of the world has been, on balance, progressive. Colonialism and (today) neocolonialism are not significant for capitalism, are rather a marginal process, a temporary aberration or diversion or side-show, not a vital need of the system as a whole, which evolves in response to internal laws of motion.
This is the accepted version of Anievas, Alexander and Nisancioglu, Kerem (2013) What’s at Stake in the Transition Debate? Rethinking the Origins of Capitalism and the ‘Rise of the West’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol. 42 (1), 78-102. Published version available from Sage at: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0305829813497823Accepted version downloaded from SOAS Research Online: http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/20673/
Ricardo Duchesne*
University
of New Brunswick, Saint John, P.O. Box 5050, Saint John, New Brunswick, E2L
4L5, Canada
Received
20 September 1998; accepted 23 July 1999
The Brenner Debate
The Dobb-Sweezy debate is often considered an intra-Marxist debate insofar as the questions and issues that were posed during it were mostly of interest to those already convinced of, or working within the Marxist theoretical tradition of historiography. The discussion charted below, “the Brenner Debate,” discusses many of the same issues, and its eponymous exponent Robert Brenner, argues indeed from a Marxist informed theoretical position. Nonetheless, the central issues in this debate were much more wide-ranging owing in part to the focus of the debate on long-term economic development in Europe. This pulled historians from various traditions into discussing the inherent orthodoxy of ‘the demographic approach’ for this problem. It is the strength of Brenner’s position, and its significance for historically informed theory that provided the groundwork for ‘Political Marxism’ (what was originally an epithet coined by Guy Bois in the contribution below, and later reclaimed in a positive sense by Ellen Meiksins Wood (1981)).
INTRODUCTION
I suppose most people who got their Marxist education in Marxist parties share certain basic assumptions about how First World economic and political hegemony over the so-called Third World has been achieved. It was a function of economic exploitation going back to the discovery of the New World and the several hundred years of advantage this gave the First World, as it expanded its control over countries to the East as well. Gold and silver mined by indigenous peoples, colonial plantations, disruption of local handicrafts in places like India all worked together to give nascent capitalist institutions in Europe the "supercharging" they needed to leapfrog over other countries where similar institutions were also gestating.
So I was surprised, if not shocked, to discover that Robert Brenner, a leader of the left-wing American group Solidarity, wrote a series of articles in the 1970s denying such connections. Brenner's critique was directed against a group of thinkers who, like Paul Sweezy, viewed themselves as operating in the Marxist tradition, and others, like Andre Gunder Frank, who rejected Marxism altogether. What they all had in common was a perspective that development in the core countries is a cause of underdevelopment in the so-called periphery. The prosperity and global power of nations like the United States was a function of the poverty and weakness of countries like Vietnam, Nicaragua and Angola.
But in Brenner's words (New Left Review, 104, 1977), these thinkers "move too quickly from the proposition that capitalism is bound up with, and supportive of, continuing underdevelopment in large parts of the world, to the conclusion not only that the rise of underdevelopment is inherent in the extension of the world division of labour through capitalist expansion, but also that the 'development of underdevelopment' is an indispensable condition for capitalist development itself."
I will argue that the 'development of underdevelopment' is indeed an indispensable condition for capitalist development itself, but before doing so it will be necessary to provide some historical background into Marxist thinking on these questions. Since Brenner claims to be defending classical Marxism against newfangled, neo-Smithian deviations, it would be useful to now review what Marx and Marxists have written.
by RP BRENNER - 2001 -
Keywords: Brenner debate, economic development, Netherlands agrarian ... standing debate on the transition to capitalism, with respect to earlier stages of.
In the most recent phase of the discussion on the historical conditions for
economic development, or the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the
town-dominated Low Countries have been neglected, because the focus has
been to such a large extent on agrarian conditions and agrarian transformations. This article seeks to make use of the cases of the medieval and early
modern Northern and Southern Netherlands, the most highly urbanized
and commercialized regions in Europe, to show that the rise of towns and the
expansion of exchange cannot in themselves bring about economic development, because they cannot bring about the requisite transformation of agrarian
social-property relations. In the non-maritime Southern Netherlands, a
peasant-based economy led to economic involution. In the maritime Northern
Netherlands, the transformation of peasants into market-dependent farmers
created the basis for economic development.
SUGGESTIONS AND DEBATES
Capitalism, Merchants and Bourgeois Revolution:Reflections on the Brenner Debate and its Sequel
ELLEN MEIKSINS WOOD
The "Brenner Debate" launched by Past and Present in 1976 was about "agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe". Robert Brenner's recent book, Merchants and Revolution, has opened a new front in the debate by introducing merchants and "commercial change" into the equation.1 Although the book's massive Postscript carefully situates Brenner's analysis of commercial development in the context of his earlier account of the agrarian transition from feudalism to capitalism, this is unlikely to foreclose debate about how, or even whether, his more recent argument about the role of merchants in the English revolution can be squared with the original.Brenner thesis. What is at issue here is not just divergent interpretations of historical evidence but larger differences about the nature of capitalism. The following argument has more to do with the latter than with the former, and it will be concerned with Brenner's work and the debates surrounding it not just for their own sake but for what they reveal about the dominant conceptions of capitalism, in Marxist and non-Marxist histories alike.
Comments on the Brenner–Wood Exchangeon the Low Countries
CHARLES POST
The exchange between Brenner and Wood on the Low Countries in the early modern period raises a number of theoretical and historical issues relating to the conditions for the emergence of capitalist social-property relations and their unique historical laws of motion. This contribution focuses on three issues raised in the Brenner–Wood exchange: the conditions under which rural household producers become subject to ‘market coercion’, the potential for ecological crisis to restructure agricultural production, and the relative role of foreign trade and the transformation of domestic, rural class relations to capitalist industrialization. Keywords: Brenner debate, economic development,
Is there anything to defend in Political Marxism?
At the conclusion of their article, “In Defense of Political Marxism” (International Socialist Review #90, July 2013), Jonah Birch and Paul Heideman note that: “Advocates of Political Marxism like Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Charles Post share a tremendous amount with their critics like Jairus Banaji, Neil Davidson, and Ashley Smith in their common perspective on the necessity for revolutionary socialism from below.”1 It is certainly true that members of Solidarity like Brenner and Post are revolutionaries who have made significant contributions to issues of central importance to the Left, many of which are perfectly compatible with the International Socialist tradition.2 Others from the same organization, like John Eric Marot, have critically engaged with aspects of that tradition such as our attitude to the Left Opposition, but in comradely ways that helped to develop our collective understanding.3
One of the difficulties with Political Marxism, however, is its political indeterminacy. Not all proponents are revolutionaries: Wood inhabits a position close to that of Ralph Miliband and his successors on the editorial board of The Socialist Register, although she too has made important theoretical contributions, above all in relation to the nature of democracy under capitalism. Other Political Marxists, however, inhabit an almost exclusively scholastic universe in which ferocious declarations of adherence to what they take to be the Marxist method are completely detached from any socialist practice, resulting in a kind of academic sectarianism.
The uneven relationship of Political Marxists to socialist practice is not however the main problem with this theoretical tendency. If it was simply a provocative historical argument about the emergence of capitalism then it would have no necessary implications for contemporary politics—and several Political Marxists have produced historical works which contain important findings independent of how persuasive or otherwise one finds the Brenner Thesis, notably Brenner’s own Merchants and Revolution and Post’s The American Road to Capitalism.
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