Ricardo Duchesne on Ellen Meiksins Wood

With the exception of an occasional article in Against the Current or 
Monthly Review, most contributions to the "transition debate" occur in 
journals that can only be read in research or university libraries. Such 
is the case with Ricardo Duchesne's review of Ellen Meiksins Wood's 
"Origins of Capitalism" that appeared in the September 2002 Rethinking 
Marxism.

Rethinking Marxism (http://www.rethinkingmarxism.org/) was launched by 
professors at the University of Massachusetts who were influenced by the 
French theorist Louis Althusser and postmodernist trends in the academy. 
They also sponsor conferences at their campus that allow tenured 
professors who have never made a leaflet in their lives to lecture 
audiences on how to achieve socialism.

Duchesne's article is not only worth tracking down as a very effective 
rebuttal to Brenner and Wood but as a rarity in the academic world: a 
witty and highly readable essay that entertains while it educates. For 
veterans of PEN-L, it might come as some surprise to discover that he 
has written such an article for in the past he was one of the most 
vociferous opponents of James M. Blaut, both on that list and other 
lists where the origins of capitalism was a hot topic. For example in 
January 1998, he wrote the following on PEN-L:

"Now consider the dilemma Blaut finds himself: why did Europe came to 
dominate the rest of the World? Answer: geographical proximity of Europe 
to the Americas(!) gave it access to its metals and labor leading to the 
industrial revolution. Obviously the notion that European capitalism 
developed as a result of the exploitation of the Third World has been so 
roundly refuted I need not elaborate this here. Just a handy, if 
incomplete, stats: At most 2% of Europe's GNP at the end of 18th century 
took the form of profits derived from commerce with Americas, Asia, 
Africa! (I think source is K.O'Brien)."

However, Duchesne now believes:

"The major drawback of Wood’s Origins is its Eurocentric presumption 
that explaining the transition to capitalism is simply a matter of 
looking for those 'unique' traits that set Europe or England apart from 
the rest of the world. Marxists can no longer rest comfortably with the 
story that England and Europe emerged from the Middle Ages with an 
internally generated advantage over the rest of Asia."

I have to salute Duchesne for having the integrity to change his mind on 
a question in which he had so much prior investment. If other scholars 
had the same flexibility, the world of academic Marxism would be much 
more creative. As it stands now, there is tendency for positions to 
become hardened because reputations are at stake. A willingness to 
change one's mind might be interpreted as a sign of weakness. 
Ironically, the same kind of rigidity is at work in the activist Marxist 
realm as well, but instead of being driven by careerism it is driven by 
a kind of "vanguardism" that refuses to admit error.

The other thing I respect about Duchesne was his willingness to conduct 
a serious debate on the Internet, just as was the case with James M. 
Blaut. For far too many academics, Internet mailing lists are a kind of 
high-level chat-room where cleverness rather than rigorous thinking is 
the goal. When I see one-liners from a professor who is taking a break 
from his current print publication effort, I am reminded of the film 
"Ridicule" set in the court of Louis XVI where aristocrats vied with 
each other over who could come up with the most clever 'bon mot'.

The main virtue of Duchesne's article is its ability to answer Brenner 
and Woods on their own terms. While the question of land tenure 500 
years or so ago might appear as dry as the parchment their deeds were 
written on, it is vital for understanding the underlying issues.

He begins by putting the debate in the context of the original exchange 
between Dobb and Sweezy during the 1950s. A common interpretation of 
this debate was that Dobb had a more consistently Marxist approach than 
Sweezy who supposedly believed that capitalism grew out of expanded 
commerce during the waning of the middle ages, especially between cities 
like Venice and Antwerp. Together with Rodney Hilton, Dobb looked to 
embryonic forms within feudalism itself that were unleashed as peasants 
struggled to free themselves. This led to class differentiation, 
competition and all the other now familiar traits of the capitalist system.

Duchesne shrewdly observes that if a "logic of accumulation" was already 
present in the Dobb-Hilton version of feudalism, then it was subject to 
the same failings as the Sweezy "commercialization" model. If capitalism 
is supposed to be such a radical departure from everything that came 
before it, then it is self-defeating to look for precursory forms in 
either trading centers like Venice or in the British countryside.

For Wood, the Brenner thesis avoids these problems by positing a kind of 
British exceptionalism. Unlike the rest of Europe, British lords were 
deprived of extra-economic powers as far back as the Norman Conquest in 
1066. Stripped of their military force by a centralizing state anxious 
to maintain control over newly conquered land, the lords were forced to 
resort to a novel use of land under their control. Rather than seizing 
tribute from the serf, they leased out their land to yeoman farmers who 
were forced to introduce all sorts of technical improvements to ensure 
that the land produced sufficient revenue to satisfy the leaseholder. 
So, in other words, the seeds of Chase Manhattan Bank and General Motors 
were planted in the days of Ivanhoe. Perhaps the only way that the deus 
ex machina goals of Brenner and Wood could truly be satisified is the 
discovery of an invasion from outer space that introduced commodity 
production as if they were the pods in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers".

The Brenner thesis rests on the assumption that the British gentry had 
accumulated vast amounts of land in the 14th to 17th century that could 
be leased to a yeoman. In other words through a kind of monopoly they 
were able to impose leaseholding on a landless class of aspiring tenant 
farmers in much the same way that postbellum plantation owners in the 
South were able to force freedmen to become sharecroppers.

There's only one problem with this interpretation. It appears that 
freeholders, or small proprietors to use contemporary language, rather 
than leaseholders, promoted the kind of technical innovations that 
distinguished British capitalist farming. Since Brenner regards small 
proprietorship as the enemy of capitalist farming, the evidence of such 
a mode of production would undermine his entire thesis. These peasants 
were frequently defended from landlords bent on enclosure by Parliament 
itself. As masters of their own land, "They were quite innovative and 
obtained higher yields per seed through extensive use of leguminous 
plants and complex crop rotations."

This jibes with Blaut's understanding of peasant small proprietorship, 
wherever it occurs.

"Next there is a very serious difficulty with Brenner's conception of 
medieval technology. He holds a very contradictory image of the 
peasantry. He thinks that medieval peasants were not at all innovative 
as to technology, but that some peasants became marvelously innovative 
as soon as they were touched by the magic wand of capitalism. The 
reasoning here is that peasants are conservative and unchanging, 
'traditional,' so long as they own the means of production, the land, 
and gain their livelihood from it…This error aside, the fact is that 
peasants were not hidebound and traditional. We can infer this from 
modern research which disproves the contemptuous attitude which European 
'modernization' theorists hold about peasants and their supposed 
'irrationality,' 'traditionalism,' and the like --an attitude which 
Brenner evidently shares. We know this also from the painstaking 
research which has uncovered a broad array of peasant-generated 
technological advances in the Middle Ages."

I will have more to say about the question of land and productivity when 
I post the concluding article in my series on slavery, the Civil War and 
the Brenner thesis. Suffice it to say at this point, the equation 
between big agricultural estates operated as industrial enterprises and 
technological dynamism is very much part of the legacy of a kind of 
Marxism. Whether this is the kind of Marxism we need is another question 
entirely.

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