Debating Agrarian Capitalism: A Rejoinder to Albritton

Abstract

The present article seeks to address outstanding areas of disagreement in this debate, as well as increasingly apparent differences of theoretical approach. The nature and origin of the social relationship of capital is discussed, and a provocative assertion is advanced suggesting that the commodification of land and its conversion to capital under the conditions of agrarian capitalism formed a prerequisite to the commodification of labour. In addressing the role played by pre-industrial manufacturing in the transition to capitalism it is argued that where customary law was widely extinguished through enclosures under the common law, custom in manufacturing slowed the process by which it was subsumed by capital.

Notes

Mike Zmolek, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Political Science, York University, 4700 Keele Street, North York, Canada M3J 1P3. The author would like to thank Ellen Meiksins Wood and George Comninel for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

The ‘end of the period’ of agrarian capitalism extends up to and beyond the early industrial revolution of the later eighteenth century. The industrial revolution does not spell the immediate end of the specific social and legal arrangements that defined the agrarian capitalist ‘system’. Far from it! To a significant degree those social arrangements continue to define British agriculture and British social institutions today. After all, strictly capitalist industry was strongly in the minority alongside traditional manufacturing well into the latter half of the nineteenth century. The specific social relations of agrarian capitalism form the context, or the background against which the industrial revolution – the emergence and relatively rapid growth and spread of strictly capitalist industry – takes place.

As I wrote ‘That the same author can, in the same article, accuse Brenner … of being a class determinist and also an economic determinist … says a great deal’ [ Zmolek, 2000: 156]. It suggests that Albritton's narrow focus on the degree to which ‘agrarian capitalism’ was actually capitalist leads him to fail to engage with the crucial point of Brenner's theory. Brenner seeks to theorize the historical process of transformation by which the fusion of the economic and the political in pre-capitalist societies is broken – in other words, how the economy is ‘disembedded’ from direct regulation by normative social relations [cf. Polanyi, 1944: 70, 129, etc.] – giving way to the ‘apparent’ separation of the political and the economic characteristic of capitalism [cf. Wood, 1981].

Albritton raises no fewer than 11 questions in his latest article. Not all of these issues are dealt with in the present article. Specifically, I do not deal in any depth with issues of teleology, structuralism, anachronism. (See footnotes 8 and 23 below.)

Those of us working within the framework offered by Brenner have yet to provide any detailed treatment of the conditions of rural wage labour during the period of agrarian capitalism. In part, this may be due to the paucity of materials available for carrying out the necessary research. Such a study is nonetheless sorely needed. The next two sections of this article will address the controversy over the commodification of labour-power. Here it is enough to point out that in tracing the way in which rural producers became market-dependent, Brenner is outlining the larger social framework and process by which labour is commodified. Albritton appears to be demanding a more detailed analysis of labour's commodification at the place of work.

I interpreted Albritton to mean by this that ‘putting-out manufacture was the primary agent at work in the genesis of capitalism’ [ Zmolek, 2001]. Albritton found this to be a ‘blatant misapprehension’ of his work, and clarifies that what he intended to claim instead is that ‘the first appearance of proto-industrial capital on the historical stage is the putting-out system in England in the eighteenth-century’ [ Albritton, 2002: 126]. I am not sure if the distinction between a ‘primary agent’ and a proto-typical form is serious enough to warrant a digression. But Albritton's use of the term ‘proto-industrial capital’ would seem to signal that Albritton is in general agreement with the approach offered in various theories of proto-industrialization, which have in common with the Uno/Sekine approach a theory of stages of transition. There is not space to elaborate a critique of proto-industialization theory in the present article.

In what follows below, however, I continue to stress that we must be careful not to dichotomize pre-industrial agriculture versus pre-industrial manufacturing.

Albritton does not provide any statistical data to back this claim.

Albritton's second point of agreement – ‘The main reference for gaining clarity on what capitalism is, is the theory of capitalism's inner logic’ – will be taken up in the fourth section on method below. The fourth and fifth points: ‘Historical analysis should be multidimensional and avoid anachronism’ and ‘Teleology in the sense of a movement towards a final historical end or an overriding logic of history is rejected’ are both points where we clearly agree in principle, though we seem to have differing concepts of anachronism and teleology. Addressing these topics is beyond the scope of the present article (see also note 23 below).

I have already refuted Albritton's portrayal of Brenner as a class determinist [cf. Zmolek, 2000: 144–5].

Albritton employs the term ‘class structure’ (a static condition) without any mention of a ‘transformation’ in class relations (a temporally dynamic or progressive condition).

I was in error in suggesting that Brenner would agree. Brenner would actually not concur. For as I went on to explain in the very same article, Brenner's argument is that market-dependency precedes and may be present in the absence of the commodification of labour-power.

Coleman [1977: 42] points out that a leasehold was not the same as land held by a ‘tenancy-at-will’. The difference may be significant to this discussion and as such it requires further study. For the present, I am suggesting that either type of tenancy facilitated that erosion of the extra-economic character of manorial relations.

One central question to pose here is whether agrarian capitalism could itself be treated as a ‘mode of production’. In posing the problem of what to do with the period that followed capitalism, Dobb [1947] pointed to a serious weakness in Marx's theory of modes of production. Marx's primary purpose in developing this theory was to distinguish the specificity of different systems of property relations, and in particular the specificity of capitalism. However the period following the collapse of feudalism around 1350 and the beginnings of ‘fully fledged’ capitalism between 1750 and 1830, was a period of more than 400 years. Moreover the period between the fall of ancient Rome and the beginnings of feudalism, i.e. between 550 and 1150 AD was approximately 600 years. As feudalism proper lasted only about 200 years, and capitalism ‘proper’ has been around for between 160 and 250 years, to classify the ‘dark ages’ and the post-feudal/early modern periods as merely interim periods between the fall of one mode of production and the rise of another seems more than a little bit problematic. Notwithstanding this, agrarian capitalism would probably not lend itself well to synchronic analyses, for England in 1850 looks very little like England in 1450. One could make much the same case for capitalism ‘proper’. This is perhaps a general problem faced by the social scientist in attempting to do synchronic analyses of large-scale social systems.

It is worth noting that Albritton is categorical in rejecting the notion that merchant activity is a prototype for capital. Since merchant activity can both reinforce or undermine a given mode of production, it ‘appears to be contingent and circumstantial’ … ‘there does not appear to be any direct or inexorable line of descent from merchant activity to capitalism’ [ Albritton, 1991: 68].

Marx wrote: ‘Money is a crystal formed of necessity in the course of the exchanges, whereby different products of labour are practically equated to one another and thus by practice converted into commodities … At the same rate, then, as the conversion of products into commodities is being accomplished, so also is the conversion of one special commodity into money’ [ Marx, 1906: 99]. The reader will note that I substituted the word ‘goods’ for the word ‘commodities’ in the text. As with the term ‘merchant capital’, Marx's usage of the term ‘commodities’ does not appear to be specific to capitalist settings. For practical purposes I employ the term ‘commodities’ with reference to capitalist society and capitalist markets only.

I am indebted to George Comninel for helping me think through this distinction between property under normative, pre-capitalist social relations and capitalist property as a social relationship involving mastery over production. While I am elaborating on the concept in my own way, the importance of defining capital as a social relation that involves mastery over production was first brought to light for me by reading a draft of an as-yet unpublished article on the topic by Comninel. Some of the ideas in the immediate section of this article were clarified through personal correspondence (16 September 2002).

Quote from George Comninel, personal correspondence by electronic mail, 16 September 2002.

Albritton responded to this claim as follows: ‘while I am not sure the divergence is “radical” his rejection of the term “agrarian capitalism” is no doubt the source of our most important differences’ [ Albritton, 2000: 148].

I intentionally leave aside the question of how and when capitalism development outside of England on the British Isles. The whole issue of continental as well as Irish and Scottish trajectories would take us far afield and on to new areas of fresh debate.

In The Brenner Debate, Brenner cites Catalonia (in northeastern Spain) as ‘the only real alternative to the “classic English” landlord/large tenant/wage-labourer form of capitalist agriculture’ where there ‘seems to have been an equally capitalist system based on large-scale owner-cultivators also generally using wage labour’. The ‘characteristic unit of agricultural ownership and production in sixteenth century Catalonia, the masia, was typically a very large but compact farm. And this structure did in fact provide the basis for significant and continuing agricultural advance throughout the early modern period’ [Brenner, 1987a: 40 n.81. Brenner notes that Catalonia, being ‘one of the few areas to achieve agrarian transformation with a concomitant increase in agricultural productivity in this era, was also one of the few areas to escape the general economic crisis of the seventeenth century and, like England, to avoid demographic catastrophe while achieving continued economic development’ [ibid.: 52 n.88]. To my knowledge Brenner has not revisited these claims, or the issue of agrarian capitalism in Catalonia. He has, however, made a similar case for Holland, which Ellen Wood has called into question.

Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn elaborated the view of England's ‘precocious’ industrialization, the incompleteness of which is said to explain England's early decline. Ellen Meiksins Wood provides a short compendium of the so-called ‘Nairn-Anderson theses’ in her work The Pristine Culture of Capitalism [1991: 178n13]. Wood critiques these theses and counters the notion that capitalism's development in Britain was incomplete, suggesting instead that ‘Britain may even be the most thoroughly capitalist culture in Europe’ [ Wood, 1991: 19].

The title of the original, longer version of my 2000 article was ‘The Specificity of Agrarian Capitalism’, and likewise the original title to a longer version of my 2001 article was ‘The Processes of Agrarian Capitalism’. These titles were meant to add emphasis to the point I am making here. Whatever method we use to model the capitalist system or to theorize its inner logic in the abstract, we still remain faced with the task of explaining how the social relationships that are assumed in the underlying structures or operations of capitalism as a system came into being in real places at real times. In other words, no account of capitalism is complete without addressing the origin of capitalism in its historical specificity. And this, in turn, requires an account of the historical process or processes by which the social relationships of capitalism emerged.

Of Albritton's five areas of disagreement, I address only one, two, four and five in this article. The third point: ‘While stating a desire to avoid anachronism, he fails to do so in practice, precisely because he is too ready to read the categories of capital back into pre-capitalist or transitional history’ is not specifically addressed, though the substance of the criticism is.

Albritton is quite specific when he writes that English agriculture ‘may have been the most productive agriculture in the world, but this has more to do with its being semi-commercialized than capitalist’ [ Albritton, 1991: 86].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mike Zmolek

Mike Zmolek, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Political Science, York University, 4700 Keele Street, North York, Canada M3J 1P3. The author would like to thank Ellen Meiksins Wood and George Comninel for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.