In the preface to this book, Henry
Heller describes the aim of the book is
to lay the foundations for a better understanding of the world we live in so
that we can "shape the future." I am not very sure he succeeds.
The book's subject matter has contemporary
importance, given that 21st-century capitalism faces one of the biggest crisis
in its relatively short existence. It should be warned that the subject of the
book is complicated and requires a lot of background reading. For someone new
to the subject, this is advisable.
In chapter one called the Decline
of Feudalism, Heller discusses one of the most critical topics in the Marxist
lexicon. The debate over the transition from feudalism to capitalism has been raging
since the early part of the twentieth century. Perhaps the most famous exchange
over the decline of feudalism and the origins of capitalism was between the Stalinist
Maurice Dobb and fellow traveller Paul Sweezy.
The two differed amongst many things,
including whether the development of commerce with the Mediterranean and the
Middle East, caused the decline of feudalism. Both were confirmed Stalinists and
both hostile to contemporary Marxism, Trotskyism.
In his article Marxism and the
political economy of Paul Sweezy, the Marxist economist Nick Beams describes Sweezey's
early origins Paul Sweezy's views on political economy were to become central
to what might be called the Monthly Review school. They were initially formed
in the latter part of the 1930s, as he began to come to grips with Marx's
analysis. Sweezy's first and, in many ways, most important work, The Theory of
Capitalist Development, arose largely out of a process of self-clarification.
It had its origins in classes he conducted on the economics of socialism, which
included an examination of the theories of various socialist writers. As Sweezy
later recounted, in the course of the graduate seminars he sought to raise the
level of treatment of Marx, discovering that it involved a "long hard struggle
to overcome the traditions and inhibitions of a neoclassical training... It
took me a long, long time before I could accept the Marxist labour value theory
because I was totally accustomed to the type of thinking of marginal utility
price theory, and so on. And ... for a long time, I couldn't see how there
could be another kind of value theory with totally different purposes.” But The
Theory of Capitalist Development was not simply a presentation of Marx’s ideas.
In it, Sweezy was to sharply differ with Marx's analysis of the law of the falling tendency of the rate of profit. Since his treatment of this question
is intimately bound up with his political orientation and his analysis of
American capitalism in Monopoly Capital—a work that was widely read during the
political radicalisation of the late 1960s and early 1970s.[1]
Sweezey's debate with Dobbs
coincided with the beginning of a systematic attack on the Marxist conception
of a transition from feudalism to capitalism. As
the radical writer, Dominic Alexander outlines"The origins of the capitalist
system in a series of revolutionary transformations, political, industrial and
even scientific was once broadly accepted, sometimes celebrated, by mainstream
history. For over thirty years now, however, the relevance of the very
concept of revolution to social change has been under systematic attack. One
choice means of neutralising the idea of revolution is to posit the problem of continuity and change in history. Approached with suitably myopic terms of
reference, it is always possible to eliminate the discontinuities across time
and to find that revolutionary phases, in fact, changed little. It is now
possible to reject the very notion of a capitalist mode of production and any
transition from feudalism to capitalism, by claiming, for example, the long
existence of a single world system of trade".[2]
Most of the chapter and for that
matter, most of the book is spent attacking the political and historical
conceptions of the pseudo-left writer and historian Robert Brenner. Heller
incorrectly labels Brenner a Trotskyist and predictably but no less criminal he
uses other pseudo-left writers namely the SWP(Socialist Workers Party) member
Chris Harman to refute Brenner.
While from an editorial point of
view, there is nothing wrong in placing Brenner at the heart of this very
contemporary debate over the emergence of capitalism. From a political or
historical viewpoint, Brenner is not that important.
Like many historians close to the pseudo-left
groups, Heller has a tendency to throw
the words Trotskyist and Marxist around with gay abandon. Regarding the feudalism/capitalism
debate, Heller's approach has been described as “separating the decline of
feudalism from the emergence of capitalism" which is countered by Brenner who
favours a "conceptual and chronological divide" between feudalism and
capitalism. Heller believes Brenner has an Anglo-centrist
viewpoint. In that Brenner ignores the fact that early capitalism did not occur
solely in Britain
For someone who has been labelled a
Marxist historian Heller barely mentions one of the most critical Marxists
produced by the 20th century Leon Trotsky. Even a cursory look at
Trotsky's work which Heller devoted only three mentions in the whole book would
throw a tremendous amount of light on the positions of Heller and Brenner. As
Trotsky explains "the entire history of mankind is governed by the law of
uneven development. Capitalism finds various sections of humanity at different
stages of development, each with its profound internal contradictions. The
extreme diversity in the levels attained, and the extraordinary unevenness in
the rate of development of the different sections of mankind during the various
epochs serves as the starting point of capitalism. Capitalism gains mastery only
gradually over the inherited unevenness, breaking and altering it, employing
therein its own means and methods. In contrast to the economic systems which
preceded it, capitalism inherently and consistently aims at the economic
expansion, at the penetration of new territories, the surmounting of economic
differences, the conversion of self-sufficient provincial and national
economies into a system of financial interrelationships.
He continues "thereby it brings
about their rapprochement and equalizes the economic and cultural levels of the
most progressive and the most backward countries. Without this primary process,
it would be impossible to conceive of the relative levelling out, first, of
Europe with Great Britain, and then, of America with Europe; the
industrialization of the colonies, the diminishing gap between India and Great
Britain, and all the consequences arising from the enumerated processes upon
which is based not only the program of the Communist International but also its
very existence. By drawing the countries economically closer to one another and
levelling out their stages of development, capitalism, however, operates by
methods of its own, that is to say, by anarchistic methods which constantly
undermine its own work, set one country against another, and one branch of
industry against another, developing some parts of world economy while
hampering and throwing back the development of others."
As regards Brenner, there is a dialectical
relationship between his politics and his historicism which the reader should
be aware of. To paraphrase the great historian E. H.Carr one should know how
many bees are buzzing around in a historians head.
One of Brenner's most important
article regarding the transition debate was the 'Agrarian
Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe' in Past and
Present (1976). The article was described as a framework within which to
interpret the English Revolution of 1640 to 1660.
Brenner carried this framework into
his most important book that centred on the English revolution, which mainly
concentrated on the rise of the merchants and particularly the role of the
London merchants in the English revolution.[4]
Brenner is heavily criticised in Heller's book for his heavy emphasis on
this group of capitalists. Brenner was not the first historian to concentrate
on this group. Although not a Marxist, the
historian Valerie Pearl in her book[5] provides us
with one the first and substantial look into the allegiances of London
merchants in the civil war.
Her research leads her to show that
the majority of the biggest merchants who
controlled the large chartered overseas trading companies and the government of
the city were royalists, while the parliamentarians were 'merchants of the
middle rank',. They were undoubtedly wealthy, but not the richest men in the city. They were important traders but not directors of the
chartered companies.”
Brian Manning also draws attention
to the mix of the bourgeoisie on both sides saying that "a serious problem in analyzing the parties is that even among
well-documented groups like gentry and merchants there are substantial numbers
of whom no information can be found of
their allegiances in the civil war. Brenner has examined 274 of the London
merchant elite, but for about half of them, there is no evidence about which
side they supported, and this must be borne in mind when drawing conclusions. Of 130 merchants who can be allocated to the parties, 78 were royalists,
43 were parliamentarians, and nine were side changers.
Breaking these figures down, he finds that the leading merchants of the Levant
and the East India companies, which controlled the city government before the
revolution, were overwhelmingly royalists, while the Merchant Adventurers, who
were now less dominant than they had been in the 16th century, were more evenly
divided”.
The fact that there was bourgeois
on both sides has been used by revisionist historians to deny the premise of an
English bourgeois revolution. This viewpoint was refuted by the Marxist writer Ann
Talbot who said "there were gentlemen and landowners on the Parliamentary side
in the civil war and small farmers and artisans on the Royalist side. One could
not expect a chemically pure revolution in which the members of one social
class lined up one side of the barricades and those of the other on the
opposite side. However. According to Talbot, the revolution pushed"people of
diverse social backgrounds into struggle against the king and well-grounded
enough in history to identify new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and
archaic guise in which they appeared—as the ideologists of the revolution
ransacked the Bible and half-understood historical precedent for some kind of
theory to explain what they were doing.
The problem with Heller's critique
of Robert Brenner's so-called Political Marxist tradition is that aside from a
few disagreements, he shares many of Brenner's pseudo-left positions. The fact that
Heller fails to point out that Brenner's brand of Political Marxism is widely
accepted in academia is deeply disturbing.
Brenner is part of an informal collection
of left-wing academics called the "No Bullshit Marxism Group.” This extremely
disparate group, many of whom, do not even claim to be Marxists like Philippe
Van Parijs, have one thing in common which is their opposition to classical
Marxism and would like to replace it with "Analytic Marxism.”
The main problem with Brenner’s work
is its dangerous concentration on the national over the international form when
it comes to the English revolution. The fact that the English bourgeois was far
more advanced than its European counterparts does not separate it from the
development of capitalism in Europe which was also developing albeit at a
slower pace as Leon Trotsky pointed out earlier in this essay.
Marx saw the development of
capitalism as global not national as he explained in Capital "the discovery of
gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in
mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting
of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial
hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist
production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive
accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations,
with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from
Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England's Anti-Jacobin War, and is still
going on in the opium wars against China. The different momenta of primitive
accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological order,
particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England at
the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination,
embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the
protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the
colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the State, the concentrated
and organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of
transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and
to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant
with a new one. It is itself an economic power”[6].
To conclude, to tackle all the theoretical
problems coming out of Heller's book would take another book to answer. Perhaps
the most dangerous part of his philosophy is his solution to the crisis of
capitalism today and the prospects for socialism.
Despite capitalism's crisis, Heller believes that socialism is off the agenda
for hundreds of years. Heller believes that the working class will have to go
through "experiments in socialism" before it can overthrow the system.
Heller regurgitates all the old
discredited and failed theories that have led to countless betrayals of the
working. Heller rejects the need to build a Bolshevik type party but insists
that all sorts of socialists need to get together in a non-sectarian way to
build a movement to overthrow capitalism.
[1]
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2004/04/ps2-a07.html
[2]
https://www.counterfire.org/articles/book-reviews/15752-the-birth-of-capitalism-a-twenty-first-century-perspective
[3]
Leon Trotsky, The Third International after Lenin, part 1, section 4
[4]
Merchants and Revolution-Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's
Overseas Traders, 1550-1653-by Robert Brenner-Verso
[5]
London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: City government and national
politics, 1625–43. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1961.
[6]
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One-Chapter Thirty-One: Genesis of the Industrial
Capitalist-https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm
