Re: Which Marxism? (fwd)

> capitalism is a mode of production first, and an economy second. these two
> can not be seperated. they are dialectically related. otherwise,
> seperetion leads us to hegelian logic. when the dialectic is resolved, we
> have socialism, as it happened historically

I don't think so.  Capitalism as an social system (economy and political
structure and production for the market) can be separated from the concept
of modeS of production, all the more so if one chooses to discard the latter
altogether.  This is what IW does.

For him, there is one mode of production, which is capitalist production for
the market, regardless of the form of production that this market/profit
oriented production takes.   By defining capitalism this way, for better or
for worse he avoids all the patch-up and Micky-mouse theorizing found in the
MOP debate, including all the difficulties of "articulated modes" among
so-called "feudal," "socialist" and "capitalist" "social formations."  It
was clear that if all these various forms are part of the same SINGLE
division of labor and political structure, and entered into each other's
logic of development, then to try and pry them appart and call one
capitalist and the other feudal or pre-capitalist, or some other term,  just
doesn't make much sense.   The criteria is interdependence by which we mean
historical causality.

I loath to quote in these exchanges, because it looks like one is citing
gospel truth.  I don't feel that way about anybody's work.  Nonetheless,
just to set the record straight about how IW disregards the entire MOP
debate, and makes a simplfying and edifying resolution, it is probably worth
it.  (But again, I'm concerned that this entire discussion -- which I
entered into simply because I felt that IW was not understood as I read and
know him -- will give the impression that I'm some kind of "Wallersteinian,"
which I'm not).  That in [] is mine, () is his:

"It was only with the emergence of the modern world-economy in the [long]
sixteenth-century Europe that we saw the full development and economic
predominance of market trade.  This was the system called capitalism.
Capitalism and a [the modern] world-economy (that is, a single divsion of
labor but multiple politiies and cultures) are obverse sides of the same
coin.  One does not cause the other.  We are merely defining the same
indivisible phenomenon by different charactersitcs.

.... the essential feature of a capitalist world-economy...is production for
sale in a market in which the object is to realize the maximum profit.

....If capitalism is a mode of production [for profit], production for a
market, then we ought, I should have thought, to look to whether or not such
production was or was not occurring [in the 16th cen.].  It turns out in
fact that it was, and in a very substantial form.  Most of this production,
however, was not industrial production...

.... Capitalism thus means labor as a commodity to be sure.  But in the era
of agricultural capitalism wage labor is only one of the modes in which
labor is recruited and recompensed in the labor market.  Slavery, coerced
cash-crop production (my name for the so-called 'second feudalism'),
sharecropping, and tenancy are all aternative modes..this specialization
occurs in specific and differing geographic regions of the world-economy [C,
SP, P]."  CW-E, p. 6, 15, 16, 17.

To reiterate my points:

1.  Wallerstein doesn't speak of modes of production (yes, modes of labor).
But the point is that there is a single division of labor with a vareity of
forms of production corresponding to the tripartite stratifiction of the
system.

2.  IW rejects the characterization of the periphery, including 16th cen.
Poland, as feudal.

3.  One of the strengths of this argument is that empircally the defining
structures of the system have not essentially changed since 1550, and it
goes along way to explaining them.

BTW, the factory system of wage-labor that Marx studied is for IW the
industrial phase of the development of the capitalist world-economy.  The
rise of industrial production in the 18th centruy is not for IW the
transition from feudalism to capitalism as so many orthodox Marxists
interpret it.

Finally, as for what you mean by hegelian, I don't understand.  Marx was a
Hegelian in the use of logic, though of course he turned Hegel on his head
by utilizing dialectic logic within an exposition of material development,
as opposed to the development of pure ideas.  This usage is most clearly
manifest in Capital, in the critiqe of political economy, as the logical
progression from the appearences and contradictions of commodity exchange to
exploitation in theory, and then to the historical circumstances and
medations of production.   This is my understanding of Marx's
application/inversion of Hegelian logic.