The Constitution of Necessity Pt. 2
Robert Brenner and Jairus Banaji on the Origins of Capitalism, A Comparative Critique and Marxist Historiographic Synthesis
A panorama in 12 folds of an Eid ul-Fitr procession in the Mughal Empire
III. Of Merchants & State
Considering the state form and its role in the emergence of the capitalist mode of production constitutes another dimension of the problems of periodization that arise from contested historiographies of the epoch which elides feudalism and capitalism. In the above section, our primary concern was with the emergence of capitalist social relations of production within peasantries and agrarian production, the dynamics which would come to articulate abstract labor as a value relation from a complete separation of producers from subsistence production. The state plays a major role in this dispossession and the organization of the means of force, but this power of the state form and its activity as an agent of capitalist class interests entails a more complex history of historical forms of capital and the capitalist organization of production prior to the agrarian transformation and dynamics of capitalist development. The role of the state carries across these historiographic interpretations, but is often subordinated to the debate over specific forms of capitalism and their identification. This is most frequently articulated as the contention over commercial and industrial capitalism, the former being a mode of commercial activity and monetary accumulation of capital that relied largely on the expansion of trade and financial networks with a labor process only formally subsumed, and thus not fully transformed, by capital, and the latter considered the form of capitalism as most thoroughly explored by Marx’s work, a mode of production fully in accordance with the logic of capital, reproducing its social relations through the transformation of all laborers into wage-laborers. In his own assessment of the dynamics between the many debates over commercial and industrial capitalism, Jairus Banaji assesses the terrain in this manner:
“The general implication of these critiques is that we need a model of commercial capitalism that allows for the reintegration of production and circulation, so that one is no longer fixated on the idea that merchant-capital is always and inherently external to production. For this to be possible, we have to see Marx’s definition of commercial capital as specific to the framework of his analysis of industrial capital, and construct a circuit of commercial capital that would explain the movement of the kinds of capital exemplified by the Dutch and English East India Companies, for example. They dominated world trade for a period of centuries and brought about the kind of capitalist world economy that large-scale industry took for granted when it began its own expansion in the nineteenth century. But, when these joint-stock companies were formed on the eve of the seventeenth century, they in turn built on the legacies of earlier and possibly less internationalised forms of merchant capitalism whose origins lie in Europe around the twelfth century, and elsewhere – in the Islamic world and China – even earlier. As a broad periodisation, I would suggest that we see the twelfth to fifteenth centuries as the period of the growth of capitalism in Europe (‘Mediterranean capitalism’) and the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries as the period of Company-capitalism, marked by more brutal methods of accumulation and competition.”1
Banaji identifies here an error in the conception of mercantile capitalism as external to the production process, and calls for a historical approach which can identify within the history of merchant’s capital a subordination of the production process such that the control of circulation regimes corresponds to a means of not only controlling the labor-process, but doing so as a valorization process positing and regulated by the law of surplus-value production. Merchant’s capital thus yields surplus value, but only as the organizer of production. The deployment of Marx’s own conception of commercial capital as a circuit in service of an integration of industrial capital is not appropriate to analyze commercial capitalism as it is organized prior to the form of industrial capitalism that is the focus of Marx’s work. Yet what this now makes necessary is the ability of the historical interpreter to identify the operation of surplus value as a condition and moment of the production process, a guiding force of compulsion between the sinews of industry drawn closer together in time, and dissipated and fragmented in space. The task of identifying and interpreting the emergence of surplus value as a law of production introduces the question of surplus labor time, the command and appropriation of surplus labor, front and center. Any satisfactory location of the production of surplus value requires that we observe abstract labor to be conducive to the temporal compression afforded by labor-power as the appropriated commodity, and a dynamic of expansion contingent upon this particularly flexible labor regime.
This formation of capital-as-process as it relates to commercial capital, as a predecessor and presupposition of industrial capital, requires us to examine the capitalistic organization of production processes, as performed by merchants in the aforementioned “Mediterranean capitalism” and the more prominent role of mercantilism as a state project promoting the organization of trade as well as industrial development in “Company-capitalism.” Examining these dimensions as they appear in the works of Jairus Banaji and Robert Brenner, we can discern the critical role of the state form as a consolidation of class power, and a nexus of capitalist transformation through the political struggles, both inter-state and internal to particular states, that would come to fuse the foundation of the state to the accumulation of capital. Within these historical moments we may see as well the necessity of the national capital complex as a mediating form of class domination and capital accumulation, but only by way of examples offered here. A more systematic and comprehensive approach will still be required. Yet despite the absence of this, we may still identify here a dynamic process of labor’s subsumption, one in which the formation of surplus value, the temporal determinations of its constitution through the exploitation of surplus labor time, is developed through the means to do so in both absolute and relative terms as needed. The temporal distinctions in subsumption can by no means be understood as historical chronology, but rather methods in the development of exploitation that can map onto the degree of capitalist development.
The earliest forms of this dynamic subsumption of labor can be found in the organization of production through an extensive world market within a world still dominated by what can be referred to here as pre-capitalist relations of production. What appears here as a conflict in historical interpretation and investigation is the various ways in which capitalist relations of production emerge in a differentiated and distinct manner within and alongside feudal or pre-capitalist political formations. This is often brought to rest on interpreting these relations of production as a synonymous expression with the form of exploitation in which they are expressed. However, as Jairus Banaji reminds us, “relations of production are not reducible to given forms of exploitation of labour,” and thus we must disaggregate these elements of a historical analysis of modes of production.2 In this case, what appears in capitalism proper as the clearly delineable category of ‘relations of production’ is muddled, severed from the underlying dynamic which grounds it in capitalism, and surfacing only at the margins of the pre-capitalist world, even if such margins may appear quite developed and form a kind of local center. Different forms of exploitation may coexist as constellations in a given mode of reproduction, aggregated additively rather than constitutively, related only contingently as distinct phenomena rather than appearances of a common essence. Yet it is not simply the class relation, but the class relation within a specific articulation of process which distinguishes capital from the pre-capitalist iterations of similar forms of these relations. With this said, the challenge of identifying and properly interpreting the assembly of this process in concrete terms requires us to locate the moments within this epoch of transformation in which we see the construction of the capital relation within the origination and formalization of this process of capital’s integration of formal categories within itself as functions, modalities in the reproduction of abstract labor and the self-expansion of value in and through the repetition of this process.
The example which is often cited most frequently as the first form of an organization of production which bears a specifically capitalist subordination of labor and appropriation of value is the so-called “putting-out” system, or Verlagssystem, a mode by which work was contracted out by a central agent, most often merchants and merchant companies, to sub-contractors in domestic and urban settings. Much of this system can be characterized as an early form of merchant-manufacture, in which the merchant classes which advanced the materials to producer sites were primarily involved in the organization of the production process itself.
“The Verlagssystem was the dominant organisational form of early capitalism, and characterised by an almost exclusive predominance of circulating capital, severe competition between capitalists, domestically dispersed labour, and the sustained use of piece-rates. It was almost certainly as widespread in the Islamic world as it became in Europe.”3
“Thus, in the textile industries ‘putting-out’ was hardly ever a stand-alone system, but was usually integrated into total production processes characterized by their ‘combined’ nature [...] Next to monopoly of the raw materials (wool of different qualities, dyestus, alum), integration of control over all these separate processes was the true basis of the merchant’s dominance in capitalistically organized domestic industries.”4
All too often, the merchant-organized dimension of these organizations of production tend to be interpreted to eclipse their classification as a modality of capitalist production. However, the case may be made that what we are still dealing with here is the distinction between an emergence of a capitalist form of the production process, through the form of the product as a commodity through the mediation of circulation, the means of remunerating the exploitation of labor-power and thus instantiating abstract labor, as a consolidated articulation of the capitalist mode of production proper, though not necessarily established as the basis for all social relations and their mediation. This itself may still be an artificial distinction which evades the central concern here, which is an identification of a form of the production process which established a means of developing, in practice, the conjunctive synchronization of capital’s categories, yet still requiring the organization proper to develop the infrastructure through which value becomes self-expanding in and through the relation of abstract labor to itself. Aside from a detailed investigation into the development of the putting-out system, we can observe what is possible in this ability to constitute abstract labor by way of descriptions of its implementation and effects, its consequence for the disruption of pre-capitalist labor and relations of production. In Braudel we find some specific examples:
“Almost everywhere (where it can be observed) this industry was of a capitalist nature, conforming to the familiar pattern of the Verlaggsystem (the domestic or putting-out system): the merchant, the entrepreneur, or Verleger, puts out to the artisan the material to be worked on for a salary [...] Wherever it was introduced it struck a blow against the guilds, the Italian arti, the Spanish gremios. Wherever it was introduced it benefited the merchant class which financed the slow production process and kept the profits from sales and exports.”5
The introduction of the putting-out system then can be shown to be both an example of merchants organizing production in a capitalist fashion, through the introduction of a mediation of labor in a production process where both their means of production and the product of labor are entirely alien property of the merchant to the laborer, and of an emergent class of wage-laborers appearing in their functional exploitation within this system. Yet, importantly, this had little to account for the full subsumption of labor within the totality of relations and does not appear to introduce a distinctly capitalist pattern of industrial development and expansion on its own. The reproduction of the system relies heavily on the organization of the merchants, as distinct from a fully developed industrial capitalism, where the subsumed working class becomes an integrated moment in the reproduction of the totality through its complete reliance upon the wage relation. What is significant here, however, is the emergence of a merchant class actively involved in and reliant upon monetary accumulation as an early form of capital, though still actively a class only insofar as this activity was successfully achieved, and, quite importantly, still as a disruptive element not entirely allied with the interests of other dominant class formations. The relation of merchants to the state can then be seen as a historically necessary element of the success of any of these initiatives of merchant’s capital to achieve successful commercial expansion and consolidation of forces. This is not the introduction of some external element, but leads to an insight into the exact nature of the state form as is illustrated by these centuries in which a capitalist class and mode of production were still only emergent in disjunctive moments. Banaji, through reading Marx’s historical material on merchant’s capital, puts the matter as such:
“[...] there is nothing inevitable about capitalism and [...] its emergence depends, crucially, not just on markets but on the state or at least a particular kind of state that sets out to encourage and bolster commercial expansion. Marx himself was quite clear that in the later middle ages both Venice and Genoa were ruled by powerful merchant interests. He referred to their merchants as ‘the most prominent people in those states’ and described them as ‘subordinating the state more securely to themselves.’ In other words, these were medieval states directly ruled by capitalist interests.’”6
The medieval states referred to here would be those of the absolutist state form, the monarch as absolute sovereign within a centralized structure of political authority. Yet to view these political forms as indicative of a pre-capitalist medieval era is to equate state form with the mode of production, and to erroneously seek a clean break between historical epochs. In fact, as Banaji states, the revolutionary character of merchant classes “were in the forefront of economic innovations, embodying a modernity which is best described as purely capitalist. Apart from bills of exchange and other financial devices and modern ways of organizing business that were innovated in the later middle ages, the chief expression of this mercantile modernism was a minute knowledge of international markets.”7 Following the immanent telos of capital-as-process which follows from the merchant-organized accumulation regimes that integrated production and circulation into themselves, the absolutist state form becomes apparent as an early modern type state. Its function, as Poulantzas would go on to state, was “precisely not to operate within the limits fixed by an already given mode of production, but to produce not-yet-given relations of production (i.e. capitalist relations) and to put an end to feudal relations of production: its function is to transform and to fix the limits of the mode of production.”8 This binding of the state to capital, however, is not uniform across the board for this epoch. The competitive dynamics of merchants, the constant warfare between states, the hemispheric divide of East and West in the Mediterranean manifest as a transformed medieval struggle between Islam and Christendom, yet modernized for this era of commercial expansion, all indicate a period of profound instability, the shifting axes of economic power an indicator of such.
Much of Banaji’s work challenges the established historiographic notions of the origins of capitalism by deploying these analyses of merchant class formation and the demonstration of an operational law of surplus value production to demonstrate a sophisticated financial and commercial network in regions where capitalist industrialization did not set in, but were nonetheless quite active in constructing the economic social totality which would engender a dynamic subsumption of production sites as commodity producers through this fusion of production and circulation, the setting of antediluvian forms of capital as mere social form into a process and logic of social wealth. This shift in attention in his work is often called to the Eastern origins of commercial capitalism, most notably in the oft forgotten role of the Islamic world in constructing these financial infrastructures. The question remains, however, as to the emergence of a more developed capitalist dynamic of industrialization in the West, particularly in England, versus in the Ottoman Empire at the time. The sophistication of Islamic political formations can be evidenced by Banaji’s survey of the intellectual development of political economy by Ibn Khaldun, as early as the 14th century:
“The political economy that frames much of this history can be described as a symbiosis between tributary Muslim states and commercial capital. Ibn Khaldun saw this very clearly when in the Muqaddimah he wrote: ‘wealth as a rule comes from their business and commercial activities,’ referring to political regimes throughout the history of Islam down to his time. The kind of commerce he had in mind was substantial, large-scale, capitalist trade. He says in the Muqaddimah, ‘Commerce means the attempt to earn a living by expanding your capital and the extent by which capital is increased is called profit.’ Labor, he wrote, ‘is the essential basis of all profit and accumulation of capital.’ Taking both ideas together it followed that the most prosperous or developed states were those with abundant supplies of labor available to those who could make commercial use of it. ‘A large civilization yields large profits because of the large amount of (available) labor, which is the cause of (profit).’ [...] To [Khaldun] the most developed states (in Europe, the Far East, and Islam) were those where capital had access to large reserves of labor and which, crucially, did not treat the owners of capital unjustly. When they did, they triggered a dynamic that usually led to their own downfall. Ibn Khaldun notes in passing that state officials and rulers were usually jealous of the capitalists, implying that there was always a strong temptation to overtax the commercial sector or even move in and monopolize some leading sector, as the Mamluk Sultan Barsbay did with the Egyptian sugar industry.”9
There is here an early iteration of the labor theory of value, a prelude to the development of political economy in the West, though one that would not see nearly as systematic a treatment until the 18th century. What Banaji brings out here in Khaldun is the explicit connection between capital’s success not only by way of the successful exploitation of labor, but through an effective relation of capital to the state. It is one described here where the state and capital’s cooperation are intrinsically tied to the command of its laboring population. This is an early indicator of an articulated theory of successful strategies of accumulation as ones where the interests of the state must be joined with those of the capitalists, a deviation from this always at danger of triggering a dynamic of internal conflict and decline. This fusion of state and capital does play out in a localized manner in the Islamic world in this period, as Banaji continues:
“Within the countries of Islam, large-scale commerce was driven by the concentration of demand in major metropolitan markets that also happened to be the seat of government and the base of some major ruling dynasty. In the Abbasid period Baghdad epitomized a market of this sort and was unrivaled anywhere in the world for the sheer concentration of wealth and commercial activity [...] the great geographies that were written between the ninth and early thirteenth centuries show that the true heart of the system lay at a lower level, in smaller, commercially active centers like Basra, Nishapur, Bahnasa, Mahdia, Sfax, Palermo, and Almeria and the vibrant networks they formed. They were the true backbone of the economy. Both state and private capital invested majorly in the commercial infrastructures known as funduqs (more correctly, fanadiq), khans, qaysariyyas, or wikalas, solid stone buildings that were square or oblong and opened on to the street ‘by means of a single, often monumental gate’ or (in the case of qaysariyyas) as many as six to eight gates. Cities like Cairo in the sixteenth century were dense concentrations of commercial capital, and the wikalas and khans were where the bulk of wholesale trade took place, commercial establishments that Labib could even describe as ‘virtual stock exchanges.’”10
The proliferation of concentrations of capital in important commercial centers that were also political centers is not a coincidence, but an expression of an important element to the successful accumulation of capital: the organization of capitalists as a class and the consolidation of their political and economic power. This aspect of the history of the capitalist mode of production’s formation is essential, and one conditioned by the emergent competitive dynamics in the social form of production as commodity production, and the commercial means of mediating the subsumption of labor within this emergent totality of social relations as abstract labor through the unity of production and circulation, the active construction of value relations and the class organization that could ensure the viability of financial infrastructures to adequately mediate these extremities. However, if this was the case in Islamic centers in such a sophisticated fashion, how are we to account for the success of the West in becoming the epicenter of modern capital accumulation and industrialization? Banaji articulates an important distinction:
“[...] the non-development of capitalism was less about a failure to emerge than about the failure to acquire a more collective, corporate form that could express and contribute to the solidarity of a class. Capitalists certainly existed in the Muslim world, but they failed to form the kind of collective solidarity implied in the notion of a ‘class.’ [...] It is a striking fact that there was never any Islamic counterpart of the West’s violent mercantilist expansion. Again, the decisive factor here is the very different ways in which commercial capital and the state were bound to each other. The powerful state backing that English merchants received from the monarchy, what Brenner calls the ‘Crown-company partnership,’ had absolutely no equivalent among the numerous dynasties that, like the Ottomans, were willing to encourage trade but unwilling (or incapable) of the kind of aggressive expansion that the Portuguese monarchy unleashed in the opening years of the sixteenth century. Of course, once the European powers embarked on their expansion into Asian markets, Islamic commercial networks were a prime target across the whole region.”11
The expansionary efforts of merchants and absolutist state forms in the West severely outmaneuvered those of the Ottomans, and further bolstered these expansionary thrusts, via colonial ventures and commercial competition, in order to subordinate Islamic trade and commerce to their own interests. Calling forth one of Braudel’s most critical insights to this era of commercial capitalism, Banaji says “if, as Braudel claims, ‘Capitalism only triumphs when it becomes identified with the state, when it is the state,’ then the externality of the state to capital remained the chief limitation on Islamic capitalism and its transformative potential.”12 State power cannot remain an autonomous arbiter to capital accumulation, entrenched in antediluvian social relations, but in fact must become subsumed by capitalists and subordinated to their control if the expansionary dynamics of surplus value production are to be reproduced. The capitalist mode of production only announces its complete arrival once it has conquered the obstacle of class organization as a function of class domination.
As merchant classes would prove a crucial development in the formation of capital-as-process through the integration of production and circulation, the competitive dynamics of commodity production and circulation would come to necessitate stronger expressions of capitalist power through the successive organization of consolidated class interests, and this manifested historically through the relationships of merchant classes and company partnerships with the centralized political authorities that formed as buttresses to the instability of this transformative epoch. It is not enough that a class exists in potential, as class is not a social relation autonomous from the movement of the material reproduction of a definite form of social life within which its existence is historically and geographically situated. For a capitalist class to ensure its reproduction, it must continue to entrench this position within the strategic centers of power given by the totality of the ensemble of social relations.
This, however, demonstrates a further complication to this history of capitalist class formation and dominance. As they revolutionize the society within which they assert their social class power, merchants do not remain the sole flag-bearers of capitalist modernity. To understand this dynamic, we may pick up on the reference to the work of Robert Brenner which Banaji cites here as an example of a more successfully competitive fusion of state and capital. In his book Merchants & Revolution, Brenner constructs a detailed history of commercial expansion in England from the 16th to 17th centuries, tracing the contours of sociopolitical conflict that comprised this era of commercial expansion and state transformation, to give an account of the English Civil War (1642-1651), its conflict between Parliamentarians and Royalists, as a product of the capitalist transformation of social relations in English agricultural production which produced a landed capitalist aristocracy and the fragmentation of merchant class interests which would come to not sufficiently ensure Royal support.
In articulating this relationship between the monarchy and merchant class, Brenner writes that “throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the merchants of London secured their profits as much through collective political initiative and organization as through individual economic enterprise. In almost every case, they founded their trades on government privileges that provided the basis for monopoly companies and the close regulation of commerce. Trade by a government-chartered, regulated company was the long-established norm in England. And it had a good and sufficient rationale in the complementary needs of the larger overseas merchants and the monarchy.”13
The relation to individual capitals and their relative success was tied intrinsically to the capacity of merchants to act as an organized political force, retaining and refining their relationships to the monarchy. State tax policies, internalized infrastructures of force and their legitimization were important costs for merchants to externalize, and their doing so successfully guaranteed the monarchy its own privileges of stature and wealth from these commercial expansions. “The merchants thus sought government-backed monopolies in order to restrict trade to members of their companies and to bar those who were not exclusively overseas traders. On this basis, they sought to regulate the shipments of the company traders, with the goal of manipulating markets for purchases as well as for sales.”14 “The overall trend throughout the pre-Civil War period -- especially when the Crown and merchant community could cooperate without interference from Parliament -- was thus toward rising levies on trade and greater protection for the merchants’ companies.”15 Any notion of an organically generated capitalism, or its development from sheer abstract compulsion, is cleanly disputed by the active construction of markets as a political venture as much as an economic one.
In this era of capitalist transformation in England, the Civil War is seen by Brenner to be a conflict that comes as the expression of determinate political class struggle as the mode by which the transformation of the state form would necessarily be enacted. The problem of capitalist class organization can then be seen as central to this conflict, but not as an already given, unified capitalist class. This fusion of state and capital sees, in the English example, a fractional composition of capitalist class interests between these commercial and industrial forms of capitalism, their ideological contestations and practical concerns expressions of their relations to production and thus, most crucially, the command of surplus labor as a function of surplus value production.
“[...] it would be my own point of departure that capitalism developed in England from the end of the medieval period by means of the self-transformation of the old structure, specifically the self-transformation of the landed classes. As a result, the rise of capitalism took place within the shell of landlord property and thus, in the long run, not in contradiction with and to the detriment of, but rather to the benefit of the landed aristocracy [...] the ‘commercial classes,’ far from uniformly capitalist or ideologically unified, were divided from, and indeed in crucial ways set against, one another in consequence of their diverse relationships to production, property, and the state [...] it [then] becomes possible [...] to begin to understand the differing political and religious outlooks of the major sociopolitical actors [...] as, in crucial respects, responsive to their differing relationships to capitalist development and its effects -- or, more precisely, to the new forms of social property relations and the new form of state that were the product of the transition to capitalism.”16
In detailing the dynamic internal to the development of a landed capitalist aristocracy, Brenner’s above theses on the dispossession of the peasantry and the emergence of a capitalist tenant farmer class which encouraged the accumulation of wealth within the English national context aligns this supremacy of economic power to the development of a dynamic of agricultural improvement and the productivity of labor, essential to the foundation of basis of political power capable of disrupting the merchant-Royalist alignment:
“What the transition from feudalism to capitalism on the land thus essentially amounted to was the transformation of the dominant class from one whose members depended economically, in the last analysis, on their juridical powers and their direct exercise of force over and against a peasantry that possessed its means of subsistence, into a dominant class whose members, having ceded direct access to the means of coercion, depended economically merely on their absolute ownership of landed property and contractual relations with free, market-dependent commercial tenants (who increasingly hired wageworkers), defended by a state that had come to monopolize force [...] The lords did succeed during the subsequent era in securing absolute property in their landed estates, in part against the claims of the customary tenantry, in part by maintaining broad demesnes as an inheritance from the medieval period. They thereby gained the ability to take commercial and competitive, not merely customary and fixed, rents from their tenants, and were able to take advantage not only of the rising food and land prices that marked most of the early modern period, but also of the growing competition in the land and product markets among their commercial farmer-tenants. The result of the latter change was increasing social differentiation [...] and significant agricultural improvement, leading to the growth of agricultural productivity. Because of their self-transformation -- partly imposed on them, partly implemented by them -- the greater landed classes thus succeeded in accumulating their great wealth and social power directly on the foundations of capitalist property and capitalist development.”17
Landed classes would come to form a distinct force from the emergent capitalist farmers that arose as intermediaries to the organization of production and the direct task of subordinating labor. Yet while these forces were immanent to the possible rupture of the monarchy, and certainly asserted a basis for capitalist class power that was new to economic development, the consolidation of the state was still capable of, however briefly, mediating these interests. The demands of the state would change in relation to the needed security of property relations, a reflection of the revolutionization of the relations to the production process, and this would come to determine the character of the political conflict over the state to follow.
“No longer needing to possess what was in effect a piece of the state, be it a lordship or an office, to maintain themselves economically, what the greater landed classes of England now merely required was a state able to protect for them their absolute private property...They therefore associated themselves ever more closely during the early modern period with the monarchy in the construction of an increasingly powerful and precociously unified state that succeeded, by the early seventeenth century, in securing (at least in formal terms) a monopoly over the legitimate use of force [...] extraordinarily effective in guaranteeing landed-class property.”18
This characteristic of the transformation of the English state form, a developing dynamic reconstitution of state power that appeared in a political dimension of contestation for supremacy between the monarchy and emergent social forces with their own basis for the production of value, demanded a political realization through the ability to control mechanisms of state power in Parliamentary bodies, and is thus an example of both capitalist subsumption of the social formation’s reproduction and the dynamic integrations of process and function which characterize this period of state formation. Statecraft appears the sole project of the designers of modernity, a creation of the world in their own image, yet the limits of power make this instrumental capability extremely conditional, subject to all sorts of reaction and transgressions of itself. The dominance of the monarchical state form, a medieval social form that still retained some exapted functional use in the total social trajectories of capitalist development throughout Europe, served the nascent English bourgeoisies, mercantile, agrarian, etc, as a guarantor body of the constitution of private property, a right which acted as the regulator of the appropriation of forms of material wealth absent an internal dynamic unity which could guarantee a lordly class this function, in accordance with its self-reproduction. The feudal period is characterized by this particular requirement of enforced unity. In the capitalist seizure of the state form and the constitution of a distinct logic of capitalist development, the functions of the state form could shift to a consolidated focus on the development and deployment of the juridico-political means of force which maintained this internal coherence of capitalist social relations of production.
What emerges prior to the upheaval which sought the active transformation of the state form were adaptations which, in effect, made this state more effective to the functions that would be demanded by capitalist interests:
“[...] the unification of the state by the early seventeenth century left the monarchy in an unprecedented position vis-a-vis the landed class [...] the state had vastly increased its effectiveness by improving its administration, extending its activity into many new spheres, and accruing massive new, especially landed, wealth in the hands of the monarch. Yet the monarchy continued effectively to control this much more powerful and much more unified state, for it maintained, as a legacy from the medieval period, considerable financial and administrative resources of its own and the right to appoint most major governmental officers [...] Monarchs were no mere executives, but great patrimonial lords [...] virtually inseparable from the state [...] inherited political (prerogative) rights to economic resources sufficient to maintain themselves and to constitute their own political following […]”19
This consolidated state form would then reduce some of the pressures exacted upon it prior by landed classes, as their own relations and functions would change:
“[...] [T]he transformation of the aristocrats into successful capitalist landlords had not only relieved them of the need for a state consisting of locally based associated lordships or estates to dominate the peasants directly; it had also very much restricted the potential for the construction of an absolutist tax/office state -- by limiting the landlords’ need for office as a source of income and by restricting the amount of landed property that could be taxed without directly confronting the landlord class [...] the English monarchy had [...] only limited independent sources of income and a restricted patrimonial following of dependents [...] the landlord class retained significant leverage over state finance […]”20
We can see here the reciprocal foundation between state and capital emerge through the security of relatively autonomous political power by landed classes in their control over finance, but also relieved the state of accommodating them within its own body by the construction of local offices. An early divergence here of the political and the economic directly manifests as an emergent division of labor amongst the dominant classes in the fusion of state and capital. Addressing the impulse to assign this dynamic to Europe as a whole, Brenner differentiates this transformation of the class structure and its relation to the state, and in doing so demonstrates how this transformation in England would constitute a dynamic internal to the state where conflict would be let in through its attempt to accommodate the transformative forces into its own functions.
“Despite superficial similarities, the English landed class’s political interests must therefore be sharply distinguished from those of the truly locally focused dominant classes of northeastern Europe, to which they have sometimes been misleadingly compared. Local landed proprietors initially looked to a more effective national monarchical state, of which county government was an integral part, to defend their property from peasants and neo-feudal magnates. But they also closely identified their own interests with the growth of the power of the monarchy and the state in a whole series of other crucial areas [...] the greater landed classes had to favor a stronger government that could more effectively regulate the social economy [...] Since the prices to be paid for agricultural products, as well as the security of the social order in the face of commercio-industrial fluctuations thus depended, to an important degree, on the health of the cloth industry, landlords had little choice but to interest themselves in government policy to regulate cloth production and cloth commerce, and especially in the state’s actual capacity to make and enforce such policy [...] government regulation of dynamic nascent manufactures produced for a growing domestic market [...] Parliament should not be viewed merely as a guarantor of the local landlords’ property and their position in the state; it served as a central means for the effective collaboration of those local proprietors with the patrimonial monarchy in operating the state and in governing the country.”21
The dynamics of industry introduced by the merchant and monarchy fusion of state and capital inaugurated a competitive dynamic of transformation through the self-transformation of agricultural production and productivity, in turn bolstering the landed classes as organizers of a domestic labor force and domestic market, and thus conditioning a transformation in the state form in its functions of securing class organization. However, the dynamics of competition and fractional class interests, most importantly the differential in domestically-situated economic power between these landed class formations and merchant relations to production would provoke still further conflict, as the monarchy would attempt to hold onto power while the functions of the state were becoming more operational in the hands of the emergent capitalist formations. A new question would come to emerge, that of “who was to control the state and for what ends.”22 This consolidation of politico-administrative functions within the state in combination with the formation of landed capitalist class formations as a nationally-based foundation for capital accumulation conditioned “the emergence of what was [...] a very new problem, both structural and constitutional. To limit, to defend against, or to make use of the state, which had ceased to be subject to fissure into its constituent parts, could no longer be achieved through the restrengthening of local or particularist powers and privileges; it had to be accomplished by taking control of it as a whole.”23 The English Civil War and its eventual culmination into the briefly-lived Commonwealth government came to articulate the expression of economic development as the political class struggle for the means by which capitalist interests came to articulate themselves in a national form through the transformation and expropriation of the state.
Landed property itself acts as a precursor to the aristocratic landlords that would become the bedrock of a purely national capitalist class formation in England. Pre-capitalist modes of appropriation and relations of exploitation were not transformed at a moment, but resolved themselves into the formation of “free” labor in relation to the bounded relation to landed property, as the fusion of the product of this land’s cultivation and the tandem exploitation of human and natural resources underwent a dynamic fusion into the transformed form of social wealth as an abstract value, appropriated in money form. The separation of labor from its own means of realizing itself had already to be separated in order for the bind to be completely wrenched from the hands of the direct producers. Commercial processes of expansion and the influx of offshore commodity trades formed the basis for this relation, a moment that only begins as the encounter of an exteriority in appearance, to be realized as an internal relation through the consequence of its adoption as a resolution to the crises of subsistence that plagued the attempted intensification of exploitation of extant feudal relations.
The state form is thus a crucial category of any theory of the emergence of the capitalist mode of production and in any historical exposition of the transition to capitalism. The political and the economic diverge in their historical apprehension as distinctive regions of an emergent mode of production based on a social division of labor produced by emergent social relations of commodity production. The advent of the realization of labor’s self-alienation through the process of its own material reproduction through the exploitation of labor-power is a process where the political constitution of capital accumulation plays an integral role in developing the conditions by which a foundation of its autonomous and relatively automatic reproduction can cohere as a specific dynamic of social production subsumed under the reproduction of capital and the relational content of its formal coherence through the paradigm of value.
As the nexus of social relations and their movement as determinate class struggle, the state form is the political articulation mediating these struggles in its appearance as a process conscious of itself, and in turn becomes a fetish appearance of struggle when conducted in isolation of its economic determinations. Commodity production lays the foundation for this particular social form of the modern state, as evidenced by its necessity as a site of capitalist class unification, itself as violent as the dispossession upon which it is founded. It is the crystallized moment of the social reproduction of definite social relations of the material production of the social formation as an active project, one that represents itself as an aggregate of institutional apparatuses of political, economic and juridical functions which represent distinct moments of a structural composition of the ensemble of social relations in their antagonistic movement with and against each other, generated by the foundation of the capital relation and value as a formal and regulatory principle. In the historical emergence of capitalism, the state form of various territorial formations of capital plays a critical role, one that clearly can demonstrate the fallacious claims of any historical epoch of supposedly “laissez faire” capitalism where freedom saw its fullest expression through the unbounded rationality of market maneuvers of expansion and social organization.
The state form has always been a pivotal site where the implicit class relations of social relations of production are articulated as definite class relations. This operates, however, not explicitly, through the official declarations of the state, but implicitly through the juridico-political mediations of the formalization of process, as observed in the means by which law serves as a space where contradiction is carefully addressed through the establishment of precedent. There is no direct acknowledgment of a distinctive mode of production that is itself historically specific and thus transient to be found in the word of law, but a formal articulation of the policing and maintenance of the boundaries of process, articulated by this process itself in its social constitution through class struggle. As the political organizer of the interests of the dominant class elements, state juridical mediations leverage legality and its construction as a means of reproducing the particular demands of capital accumulation within a given conjuncture. As the primary disorganizer of the subordinated classes, the juridical functions of the state form mediate the uneven and hierarchical relations of political power amongst classes through the construction of the legal citizen as a blanket subjectivity through which every subject engages the law through the claim of right. This introduces a critical function of isolation as a condition to be continually imposed, not merely as an abstract domination, but a continuous self-alienation of the species in the project of the constant reconstitution of abstract labor, refracted through the lens of the dominant juridico-political infrastructure and ideology, guaranteed through the requisite means of enforcing this relation upon these “equal” subjects.
Historically, the state cannot be interpreted as an entirely autonomous and self-subsisting body of social activity apart from the economic basis by which this constitutive activity shapes its institutional formations. Likewise, the state form must not be too understated through this apprehension of its coherence as a moment of the totality of capital’s processes of constitution, reproduction, and transformation. The characteristic fetishization of capitalist social relations, a result of the historical climax of labor’s self-alienation through the material distinction between private property and the formation of the commodity labor-power, refracts through the prism of social life subsumed to the reproduction of itself as value relations in many distinct ways. It is the quality of social relations as moments of a process, mediated through the commodity form of value through which their crystallizations appear, which imbues these various functional moments as separations constituting this unity of fragments in process, that constitutes the phenomenon of fetishization. In a way, the state form and its appearance as the purest articulator of social agency is the paramount example of the fetish construct, through which the impossibility of surmounting historically specific social relations is integrated into the ideological region which mediates the atomistic subjectivities of class struggle into constant restructurations and rearticulations of the same structural antagonism. Class struggle is both an immanent motive force of capitalist development, through this subsumption of human activity, and the means by which the capital relation’s supersession is posited, in the crises opened up by the discontinuities initiated through this struggle.
Conclusion
Class struggle itself proceeds unevenly, and is not a determinate unfolding in the sense of realizing an already articulated social form, but is itself the process of social constitution of the ensemble of social relations, necessarily uneven and disparate, which are brought into relation with each other through growing social productive powers within definite relations of production, themselves within definite historico-geographic constraints of their practical realization. The capitalist “transition” can only be understood as the outcome of protracted class struggles and sociopolitical conflicts, themselves determined by the exhaustion of feudal relations wrought by extensive subsistence crises and the deterioration of medieval and feudal political systems’ capabilities of subordinating the contingent adaptations of economic life which arose from these crises themselves. Commercial capital conditioned the social form of the product as the commodity, becoming a mediating abstraction capable of subsuming within it and fundamentally transforming the qualitative specificities of surplus product that remained limited in the strict adherence to a determination in their concrete forms. Abstraction grows from the impasse of a concrete unity’s ability to continue to define itself and guarantee a stable motion of the reproduction of material life. As the commodity form is conditioned by the process that mediates it and it is mediated by, so it becomes the element of form-determination in its articulation of the concrete shape of the production process itself, the very rendering of the production process as the autonomous sphere of the production of commodities. However, this abstract schema cannot be mistaken for a coherent logic that develops instantaneously, but comes to being through the necessities imposed by the limits defined by these struggles.
The immanent transformation of extant class structures must be emphasized. The emergence of capitalism as a mode of production, in and through the formation of capital as a mode of production via a social form of relating the products of human labor as an abstract basis for equivalency, via the extensive and expanding trade networks of the world of commodities, their subsequent representation and appropriation as values through their integration with the money form, and the renewal of the accumulation cycle of this autonomous form of value, was not an implantation of an external logic conceived a priori of the historical conditions of social life encountered by these emergent phenomena. The logic of capitalist development is not the prior construction, but the immanent separations which come to constitute the dynamic trajectory of capital accumulation and the subsumption of the labor process. The elision of the feudal and capitalist eras is not a transition of production processes themselves possessing a complete coherence in this epoch, but a coinciding of intensified social antagonisms present throughout the pre-capitalist era, and the “transition” itself a product itself of the eventual contestations that would come to be most decisive in temporarily bringing resolution to these crises.
This demonstrates to us that any historiography of the emergence of the capitalist epoch must rather go further than identifying an original instantiation of a complete articulation of capitalist production, but account for the dynamics of capital’s historical existence as a socially constituted form, and the specific organization of the production process as the production of capital. To understand these, it is essential not to view feudalism and capitalism as cleanly delineated epochs, nor as mutually coherent modes of production unto themselves, but specific epochs that share a historical proximity in the constitution of capitalism’s social transformation. What once was will not be reconstructed, nor would it be desirable to do so. Furthermore, its modes of class domination and relations of exploitation informed and conditioned the development of capitalist social relations, and thus a clean break from the old form is rather an appearance which results from the intensified acceleration of transformation that specific conjunctures may induce, but not altogether break from the same temporal continuity. Ruptures are, after all, reconstitutions of continuity.
Returning to the conversation from Q which introduced this essay, the millenarian connotations of the dissolution of a historical epoch feel impossible to avoid. What our friend Eloi reminds us, however, is important: “The Apocalypse isn’t an objective to be sought, it’s all around us [...] if you want to change the world of men you’ve got to live in it.”24 Echoing Banaji’s complex dynamic of crystallization in intensifying feudal crises, it is a rather similar situation with the capitalist mode of production in the present conjuncture, itself molded and shaped by decades of deepening crises and ever-longer periods of recovery (if a full recovery is possible at all). The waning guarantees of reproduction for capital and its increasingly restive subjects of exploitation and abjection allow us, in the contemporary moment and its immediate history, a crystallization of capitalist production’s own laws of motion, a rapid temporal compression of its long-form tendencies, its dissolutions and the unrest fomented by them the wrecked prospects of a mutually-conditioned reproduction of contending classes, which necessarily finds itself taking place on the world stage. Abstract laws are not present, ready at hand, from any given point in history, but the velocity of crisis allows us to see a social form at its most pure; for capitalism, it is the blind lashing out of accumulation absent its material foundations of expansion, the increasing rapidity of these motions rising from a bare hum that could only be heard in the distant peripheries decades ago into a fever pitch of such frequency that its content appears rendered still in form, apprehended in an audible tone for all to hear, the abstract laws of motion as equally present and intangible as a suspended tone resonating in still air.
We may be reminded of the ways in which “Omnia sunt communia” rang out from the pre-capitalist revolts of the peasants, the knowledge of a life in common as an objective centuries before the modern communist movement first articulated itself. There is a moment in Capital in which Marx sees this same immanent possibility, the historical obstacle to capitalism’s transience as continually given and reasserted by capital itself. It is no sooner that capitalists emerge and engage in competition that they begin to devour each other, an eternal cannibalism intrinsic to the dynamic reproduction of the social form’s own metabolism. From within this, and the class struggle which has given it and continually shaped it, the nature of capital’s supersession is given:
“This expropriation is accomplished through the action of the immanent laws of capitalist production itself, through the centralization of capitals. One capitalist always strikes down many others. Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by a few, other developments take place on an ever-increasing scale, such as the growth of the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the planned exploitation of the soil, the transformation of the means of labour into forms in which they can only be used in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and, with this, the growth of the international character of the capitalist regime. Along with the constant decrease in the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”25
Banaji 2010, pp. 257-8. Emphasis added.
Ibid, p. 353
Ibid, p. 275
Banaji 2020, p. 91
Braudel, F. The Mediterranean Volume I (1995), p. 431
Banaji 2020, p. 120
Ibid, p. 121
Poulantzas, N. Political Power and Social Classes (1973) pp. 160-1. While deploying Poulantzas’ characterization of the absolutist state in its context here, we wish to make clear that this is not an endorsement of his theory of the state, nor is this section aimed at reproducing that analysis.
Banaji (2020) p. 129
Ibid, pp. 130-1
Ibid, pp. 132-3
Ibid, p. 133
Brenner, R. Merchants & Revolution (2003) [1993], p. 54
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 203
Ibid, pp. 649-50
Ibid, pp. 650-1
Ibid, pp. 652-3
Ibid, p. 653
Ibid, p. 655
Ibid, pp. 655-6
Ibid, p. 657
Ibid, p. 659
Blissett (2003) p. 404
Marx (1976) p. 929