Re: Which Marxism? (fwd)

First, let me say I think this is a productive discussion and I regret if
some of my wording came across too strong.

> >Class, states, relations of production, are all
> >there in IW!
> >And the emphasis is not on economy!
>
> again this is irrelevant to the subject matter of discussion.i am pretty
> much aware that class, states and relations of production are in IW.

Well, perhaps you are and perhaps I misintepreted what you meant when you
pointing out the neo-Smithian critique of IW.

> debate was about whether capitalism emerged as a world economy  or a mode
> of prouduction FIRST. as a Marxist, i buy the argument suggested by
> Marx in Capital, which he describes in the primitive accumulation chapter
> in details. i explained, previously, about why i am convinced by marx's
> argument, and not by the periodization suggested by Wallerstein, because
> britain was definetly capitalist before netherlands emerged as a
> capitalist state (1650, pp.7). so, the narrative constructed by Marx is
> still legitimate.

Perhaps it is to some extent, but the problem with Marx is that he didn't
explain how Britain or other states became what we now call core capitalist
states as a result of the emergence of a world-system.  He merely mentions
the emergence of a world market (which we know isn't the same thing as a
world-economy) and early forms of merchant capital.  His immediate focus was
on the factory system, not capitalism as a social system.  He didn't explain
the tripartite division of labor (core, sp, p) or unequal exchange, and how
changes in one area, like the second serfdom in Poland and the encomenderos
in New Spain, were related to the decline of Southern Europe and the rise of
Western Europe.  I think Marx's ideas are key, but he isn't so great that he
could do it all.

> wallerstein is definetly influenced by Braudel.

Yes.  From Braudel he discoved the empirical entity "world-economy" and also
received encouragement from Braudel on MWS 1 (not to mention naming the
research center at Binghamton U. after Braudel).

> you argued that
> states do not play a role or do not matter so much in the world economy
> ,referring to wallerstein and suggesting that there is one single economy
> not a nation state system. i agree with this argument FULLY.

On the contrary, I wrote that states do play a major role in IW's scheme,
and the citations from IW that you supplied substantiate the point.

> if you have any
> criticisms of IW's theory, different from the ws perspective, i would be
> crucious to see. may be, you have some concrete references.


>  > on the other hand,wallerstein suggests that
> capitalism would
> be > impossible in a closed economy.  it needed commercial relations among
> > >states in order to survive. according to his argument, the capitalist
> > >world economy came into being in the 17th century, in a fully developed
> > >form, when the United Provinces emerged as a first hegemonic capitalist
> > >state in pursuit of expansion and colonial domination.

Well, I'd word this a bit differently.  Capitalism is a division of labor
not commercial relations (I keep harping on this because it doesn't seem to
be sinking in) that spans multiple states.  IW argues that other
world-economies turned into empires (that is an economy with one state, like
Rome and I'd add Tokugawa Japan) wherein the states could control
capitalists preventing capitalISM as a social system from emerging.
(Others, including AG Frank, have a different view.)  In contrast, because
the multiple state structure of the modern world-economy has remained, the
logic has been inverted such that states need to help their respective
capitalists grow vis-a-vis all other states, capitalists, and workers.

> >Given the fact of the division of labor, this
> >is
> >much
> >more convincing than focusing only on conditions in Poland -- indeed, how
> >did
> >a "Poland" as a nation-state come into being except as part of the
> >world-system?
>
> i was NOT talking about Poland as a nation state. Poland was not even a
> nation state in the 16th century(in the capitalist sense). it was still
> feudal ruled by barons. in fact, wallerstein quotes Kula several times in
> the second volume (look at the index, p 131-135, 137-38,140, 236).
> Kula explains why Poland did not experience the kind of structural
> trasformation to capitalism, as it happened in Europe, till the 18th
> century, and why  the mode of production remained essentially feudal. he
> looks at the internal as well as external dynamics of backwardness,
> underdevelopment and agricultural economy. he is a respectable marxist
> writing about the periphery.

He doesn't write about the "periphery" but about the Third World, and there
is a major conceptual difference in terms of the unit of analysis.   IW
doesn't quote Kula to demonstrate that Poland was feudal.  For IW, Poland
was as much part of the capitalist world-economy as Britain.  Poland did not
have a feudal mode of production and was a capitalist state in IW's view.
You and Kula may disagree, but I was merely pointing out IW's view.

> >The above terminology is confused: for IW and others, states are not the
> >units of
> >analysis (though they are often units of observation).
>
> i may agree with this... but i still beleive that there is too much
> emphasis on the _state_ despite the claims to the contrary. (see the
> quotes above)

Odd, because there were many criticisms that IW left out the state.  I'm
pointing out that the state was always integral to his analysis.

> OKEY. here is the key argument. capitalism is FIRST OF ALL a mode of
> production. it needs to reproduce itself to be able to reproduce the
> system globally. it is qualitatively distinct from feudalism. it is based
> on profit and surplus expropriation from the worker, and also a market
> mechanism. (by definition). it is a system in which the ownerswhip and
> instruments of production is not in the hands of the state, but in the
> dominant classes.

Well, not exactly in IW's view, in which the concept of "the mode of
production" is irrelevant.  Capitalism has a variety of forms of production,
wage-labor still being a fraction of all forms of labor even in core states.
The system is capitalist because regardless of the form, most production is
for the market for profit and is part of a single division of labor.

> >Marx was focused on factory wage-labor
> >because he thought the revolutionary class would emerge from it.  But he
> >never
> >completed his analysis, which developed in the direction from abstaction
> >to
> >historical concreteness, from England to the entire system, from the
> >1850s
> >to
> >1450s.
>
> i do not follow your argument here. marx argued that wage labor was
> another slave labor(factory conditions were horrible--prolongation of
> working day), however it was historically and qualitatively
> different from slavery. in slavery, you sell your body. your body is the
> capital because there is no market mechanism to produce capital. in
> capitalism, you sell your labor as an instrument of
> exchange and production. it is the source of profit. you sell your labor
> in return for wages which does not exist under slavery because there is no
> wage system there. bourgeois juridical contract justifies this relation.
> capitalism is a historically UNIQUE and CONCRETE form of exploitation,
> first originated in england with the emergence of wage system. it is
> historically contingent.

Well, modern slavery which supplied British factories with cotton, as Marx
points out, is capitalist slavery.  Still, as Tomich argues in his Slavery
in the Circuit of Sugar (which I think is a brilliant  though subtle
critique of IW -- read the facinating introduction), modern slavery in the
Carribean does have a certain logic of transformation that is distinct from
factory wage-labor, though both are interrelated within the evolving
world-economy.  Wage-labor, in other words, is just one form of many that
make up capitalism as a social system underpinned by their interrelation
in/as the division of labor.

As for Marx, Roman Rosdolsky has a two-volume book "The Making of Marx's
Capital" which explains what I'm talking about in terms of Marx's
theoretical-empirical movement from the commodity to historical capitalism.