Thinking out loud

While at the Barnard library at lunch to fetch a copy of Ronald Hilton's
book on the Dobb-Sweezy debate, I spied something interesting titled
"Capitalism and Unfree Labour" by Robert Miles.

It appears to steer a mid-course between Sweezy-Wallerstein-Frank and
Dobb-Laclau-Brenner-Genovese by positing something called "articulations of
modes of production" which includes unfree labor as "an anomalous
necessity" in the development of capitalism. That strikes me as
Althusserian jargon, but I will give him the benefit of the doubt for the
time being since it has some valuable empirical research on the Caribbean,
Australia, South Africa and Western Europe.

Miles includes an overconfident dismissal of one of Wallerstein's key
ideas. According to Miles, Wallerstein conceives of a non-revolutionary
transformation from feudalism to capitalism as a sort of conscious choice
by the ruling class: Quoting Wallerstein:

"there was a sort of creative leap of imagination on the part of the ruling
strata. It involved trying an alternative mode of surplus appropriation,
that of the market, to see whether this might serve to restore the
declining real income of the ruling groups. This involved geographical
expansion, spatial economic specialisation, the rise of the 'absolutist'
state -- in short, the creation of a capitalist world economy." (The
Capitalist World Economy", 1979)

For Miles, this amounts to sacrilege against Marx, since modes of
production can only transformed through revolution in the Marxist scheme of
things.

Yet this view is being challenged on at least one key front, and
furthermore seems to have won the endorsement of Ellen Meiksins Wood, the
President of the Robert Brenner Fan Club. Namely I speak of George
Comninel's Marxist reframing of the 'revisionist' French historian school
which questions the appropriateness of classical Marxist historiography of
the French revolution and specifically the portrait of a "revolutionary
bourgeoisie". In Comninel's slim but insight-filled book, we discover that
there was very little true class struggle between the gentry and the
non-titled elites in the countryside. Not only were they socially
homogeneous, there was little evidence of a desire by the celebrated
revolutonaries of 1789 to overthrow bondage in the countryside. If there
was to be a social transformation, it appeared to be the outcome of class
struggle by the propertyless. This view is not only found in historians
like Furet, but in Daniel Guerin's history of the French revolution.

Furthermore, haven't we just been witness to one of the most spectacular
economic transformations in the 20th century in terms of "stages" that--as
Wallerstein put it--"involved trying an alternative mode of surplus
appropriation"? What other term could better describe the collapse of the
USSR as the ruling strata opted for another form of exploitation. While the
transition from capitalism to socialism--such as it was--required bloody
class struggle, the reverse transition took place rather peacefully all in
all.

And so what is the lesson? I guess that the only revolution which truly
deserves the name is the one that is directed at the propertied by the
propertyless. In different eras, it will be Spartacus, Babeuf or Mao. But
what unites them all is a desire to eliminate slavery, either ancient,
feudal or wage-based. The goal has always been to own collectively to
produce for the common good. The main confusion in the period following the
rise of the "bourgeois democratic revolution" has been the class interests
of the oppressed versus that of our oppressor. And obviously we need an
analysis of world capitalism that places no confidence in the revolutionary
potential of our oppressors.

Louis Proyect
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