Political Marxism, Robert Brenner

[Dodo]

Interestingly, my economic history teacher gave us a list of readings for a paper. One of the papers was "The Origins of Capitalist Development:
a Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism" by R.Brenner, an American Marxist economist.

I was doing a mini-research just before I started reading this almost a book article. Came across something completely new to me within Marxism called Political Marxism. It is apparently like a circle of Marxist academic researchers who diverged on an issue within Marxist histography.
Mainly, the transition from feudalism to capitalism. There is also the debate of I.Wallerstein with Brenner which is part of this strand of Marxism.

The reason I made a thread is because I have never came across this and it mainly deals with Marxist perception of history. I made a brother-thread to this regarding "what drives history" in the theory section.
Unfortunately, there does not seem to be many members interested in this stuff.
I would love to be enlightened regarding this
*political marxism
*brenner-wallerstein debate

Wallerstein is the guy who created a very powerfull neo-Marxist theory, development-underdevelopment; core-periphery countries and global implications of capitalism/imperialism in a modern context.

[Red Commissar]

I've never heard of him but I did manage to dig up that article you reference. It's a long read- 60+ pages looking at this. I'll try to read it tomorrow and see what I think of it.

Could you explain more about what you've found so far?

[blake 3:17]

I don't Wallerstein other than reading the occasional article.

There is The Brenner Debate. This seems a good summary as far as I understand it: http://understandingsociety.blogspot.ca/2010/01/brenner-debate-revisited.html

Ellen Meiksin Woods (she and Brenner think on similar lines) took it up here in 2001:
http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/993

I've frequently had trouble seeing the exact importance of some of theoretical distinctions being made. Not saying they're wrong or right, just not quite getting it.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

check out Verso/Aakar's edition of 'The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism'.

There was a debate in the publication Science and Society in the 1950s, mainly between Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezy, over the economic history of the topic of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It's fascinating, i'd check it out. Good proper economic history like that is really dying out now and being replaced with cliometrics which, interesting as it is, is nothing to do with historical enquiry, it's history-by-numbers.

[Dodo]

I've never heard of him but I did manage to dig up that article you reference. It's a long read- 60+ pages looking at this. I'll try to read it tomorrow and see what I think of it.

Could you explain more about what you've found so far?

It is more understandable when looked at its historical context, like everything else :)

I think we can sum-up all this debate in the context of Cold War/USSR confusion, birth of Neo-Marxism and Newleft.

There is a bit of playing with central themes to Marxism. You know how around 60s, 70s words anti-imperialism became more popular to left than class struggle. It is stil like that where I am from, Turkey for example.
Basically, Wallerstein(world systems theory) and the dependency theorists(like A.G. Frank), through a Marxist analysis came to the conclusion that reason capitalism did not develop in the developing world after its introduction is because of "dependency", "neo-colonialism" or development of underdevelopment.
Basically, world economy is in such a relations that for there to be developedness(west), there has to underdevelopment(political ties-power in international area, TNCs, terms of trade, corrupt ruling classes cooperating with west keeping their countries backwards, almost forced shaping of developing countries to be more extractive of primary/agricultural goods rather than investing in productive capital...etc)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_theory

These became very poweful and central to stances of left, especially in Latin America. It fueled the third-worldism, nationalist-populist movements became more powerful. At the time, more "bourgouise" dependency thinkers advocated Import Substitution Industrialization(ISI)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Import_substitution_industrialization
to stimulate development of national bourgouise/social transformation which failed miserably on the long-run.

In anycase, its a still good explanation. The core of the debate is this shift to anti-imperialism from class struggle. As far as I understand Brenner, through his explanation of transition from feudalism to capitalism tries to make the case for focusing on class struggle. Whereas Wallerstein and the Marxist economists he based his thoughts on like Sweezy explain it in such a way, so it makes the case for anti-imperialism.


I don't Wallerstein other than reading the occasional article.

There is The Brenner Debate. This seems a good summary as far as I understand it: http://understandingsociety.blogspot.ca/2010/01/brenner-debate-revisited.html

Ellen Meiksin Woods (she and Brenner think on similar lines) took it up here in 2001:
http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/993

I've frequently had trouble seeing the exact importance of some of theoretical distinctions being made. Not saying they're wrong or right, just not quite getting it.

Yep, it is indeed a very important debate especially for explaining todays development-economics side and countries which are still not completely capitalist.
I too have not read the details so I do not really know how they make their point.


check out Verso/Aakar's edition of 'The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism'.

There was a debate in the publication Science and Society in the 1950s, mainly between Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezy, over the economic history of the topic of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It's fascinating, i'd check it out. Good proper economic history like that is really dying out now and being replaced with cliometrics which, interesting as it is, is nothing to do with historical enquiry, it's history-by-numbers.

Yep, Wallerstein-Brenner debate is an extansion of that. There are a lot of references to Dobb and Sweezy.

[Five Year Plan]

Interestingly, my economic history teacher gave us a list of readings for a paper. One of the papers was "The Origins of Capitalist Development:
a Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism" by R.Brenner, an American Marxist economist.

I was doing a mini-research just before I started reading this almost a book article. Came across something completely new to me within Marxism called Political Marxism. It is apparently like a circle of Marxist academic researchers who diverged on an issue within Marxist histography.
Mainly, the transition from feudalism to capitalism. There is also the debate of I.Wallerstein with Brenner which is part of this strand of Marxism.

The reason I made a thread is because I have never came across this and it mainly deals with Marxist perception of history. I made a brother-thread to this regarding "what drives history" in the theory section.
Unfortunately, there does not seem to be many members interested in this stuff.
I would love to be enlightened regarding this
*political marxism
*brenner-wallerstein debate

Wallerstein is the guy who created a very powerfull neo-Marxist theory, development-underdevelopment; core-periphery countries and global implications of capitalism/imperialism in a modern context.

A lot of people here know about these issues, but aren't prepared to present essay-length presentations about them. Is there a specific question you'd like to have answered about these terms or debates?

[Dodo]

A lot of people here know about these issues, but aren't prepared to present essay-length presentations about them. Is there a specific question you'd like to have answered about these terms or debates?

Yep. What is the difference, the driving force for transition to capitalism from feudalism according to both sides? How are they conflicting and what are the implications?

[Five Year Plan]

Yep. What is the difference, the driving force for transition to capitalism from feudalism according to both sides? How are they conflicting and what are the implications?

Everybody thinks that the "driving force" was class struggle. The Brenner school construes class struggle in abstraction from the forces of production, so that feudal lords shifted to wage labor as a result of serfs/peasants as a class fighting emancipatory type battles that freed them from the land and improved their status to that of contracted wage workers for newly capitalist land-owners.

Critics of the Brenner school point out that class struggle can't be abstracted from the development of the forces of production, and that the peasantry had become differentiated into poor, middling, and wealthy gradations by late feudalism. It was the wealthy peasants, by virtue of their economic power founded upon increased agricultural market exchange with developing cities, that were the ones to force the lords into offering peasants commercial leases, thereby transforming the wealthy peasants into burgeoning capitalists who paid deductions from their profits to land-lords. For the critics, capitalism developed from the bottom-up, rather than Brenner's model of capitalism developing from the top.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Everybody thinks that the "driving force" was class struggle. The Brenner school construes class struggle in abstraction from the forces of production, so that feudal lords shifted to wage labor as a result of serfs/peasants as a class fighting emancipatory type battles that freed them from the land and improved their status to that of contracted wage workers for newly capitalist land-owners.

Critics of the Brenner school point out that class struggle can't be abstracted from the development of the forces of production, and that the peasantry had become differentiated into poor, middling, and wealthy gradations by late feudalism. It was the wealthy peasants, by virtue of their economic power founded upon increased agricultural market exchange with developing cities, that were the ones to force the lords into offering peasants commercial leases, thereby transforming the wealthy peasants into burgeoning capitalists who paid deductions from their profits to land-lords. For the critics, capitalism developed from the bottom-up, rather than Brenner's model of capitalism developing from the top.

There's an element of truth in both sides.

Certainly, if you look at Britain, by the late 14th century there was a class of peasants who were effectivelly small-time gentry; they lived wealthy lives, lived off the fat of the land and even employed poorer peasants (wandering labourers) to do their labour for them; they were effectively the early version of the capitalist farmer to arise from within the peasant social strata.

Though judging by the chronology of events, causation probably runs from this stratification of the peasant class into poor, middling and rich, towards the capitalist development in towns and the interplay between that and the actions of the formerly feudal lords, one may also assume some dialectical relationship here; the very existence of towns provided an incentive for the emancipation of the serfs - the fairly ropey legal framework governing the lord-serf relationship by the 14th century (as the feudal system began to disintegrate) meaning that if a serf escaped their lord's control and ran away to the towns, they were basically free for life, an effective way of moving up the social ladder indeed! In other words, causality runs both ways, to a varying degree, between the stratification of the peasant class, and the existence of new institutions 'from the top'.