Lecture3.pptxECOP2012 Social Foundations of Modern Capitalism
Professor Adam D. Morton
Blog sites: Progress in Political Economy (PPE) http ://ppesydney.net /
Twitter: @AdamDavidMorton
#ECOP2012
The American Road to Capitalism
Social Property Relations
Ellen Meiksins Wood: market compulsion
Charles Post: The American Road to Capitalism reviewed by Bill Dunn on PPE: http:// bit.ly/1eoW8UX
Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism (2011)
North-eastern agrarian petty-commodity production
American Southern plantation-slavery
The frontier-régime of accumulation
Conclusion: What is missing?
1. Social Property Relations
Realist account: Peace of Westphalia (1648) as epochal: state sovereignty, territoriality, diplomacy, non-intervention.
'The idea that the Westphalian settlement marks the beginning of the modern states-system ... rests on an erroneous conflation of absolutist and capitalist forms of sovereignty’
— Benno Teschke, 'The Origins and Evolution of the European States System', in Ordering the International (2004), 56.
Age of Absolutism (1660-1815): Ancien Régime France stalled the transition to capitalism as centralised state fusing ‘state’ and ‘economy’ distinct from English state formation
1. Social Property Relations
Focus on social property relations
Distinct property relations and processes of state formation.
Significance?: understanding the rise of capitalism and modernity.
Historically specific capitalist property relations and structure of sovereignty.
1. Social Property Relations
Imposing market dependence:
Land commissioners of Van Diemen’s Land (1828):
‘so long as the colony remains a common, and it is at the option of every one whether he chooses to fence or not, how can any man count upon being repaid for his labour by agriculture, or how is the breed of sheep to be improved?’
─ Anne McKay (ed.) Journals of the Land Commissioners for Van Diemen’s Land, 1826-28 (as cited James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land (Black Inc., 2019: 182).
1. Social Property Relations
French Revolution (1789) did not create a capitalist state: entrenched state offices in favour of a non-capitalist set of dominant classes.
‘Absolutist sovereignty expressed the fusion of the economic and the political in the person of the king’ — Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648 (2003), 172.
war as political accumulation: lords built up means of coercion, war making, as a basis of state-builing
war making the state and the state making war as a class strategy of political accumulation.
2. The American Road to Capitalism
Self-styled location: ‘Capital-centric Marxists’ (p. 2).
Uneven and combined regional development explains the outcome of the American Civil War (1861-65)
The ‘frontier régime of accumulation’: geographical expansion of plantation-slavery and petty-commodity production
Two geographical logics: plantation-slavery blocked the expanded reproduction of capitalism whereas petty-commodity production enabled the rise of capitalism
2. The American Road to Capitalism
Thirteen Colonies (1775)
Northern merchants: trade of cotton with the capitalist world-market
Accumulation of mercantile wealth: trade, commerce, home-market for industrial capital
2. The American Road to Capitalism
By the 1840s and 1850s, agrarian self-organised commodity production in the Northeast and West
Merchant-capital through exposure to the law of value, land speculation, internal improvements responsible for dependence of farmers on commodity production for economic reproduction
Northern agriculture shaped by petty-commodity production, specialisation, competition, accumulation and technical innovation
2. The American Road to Capitalism
Ante-bellum north-eastern agriculture: western Massachusetts transformed into agrarian petty-commodity production, industrial capitalism
Rural households subjected to the law of value, forced to innovate, develop labour productivity, compelled to produce for a growing market, struggles over land
Land speculation pushed producers into farm-tenancy for larger land-companies, railroads, wealthy farmers
Rising taxes subordinated north-western rural households to market compulsion and the law of value.
2. The American Road to Capitalism
‘Increased land-prices and property-taxes in the late 1830s and early 1840s made the north-western “yeomanry” dependent upon the market for their economic survival. To ensure their continued and expanded possession of land, north-western farmers in the 1840s and 1850s had to pay growing land-debts, operating loans and taxes’
— Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism, p. 90.
Contradictions between agrarian petty-commodity production in the Northern countryside and a growing agro-industrial complex with the plantation-slavery system in the American South
The American Civil War reflected such class struggles over primitive accumulation and the beginning of industrial capitalism
2. The American Road to Capitalism
Slave-based agriculture shaped by the world market based on techniques to increase output / reduce costs through slave-produced cotton
Slave plantations self-sufficient in food: independent-household production
Class structure of the ante-bellum south: more slaves, more land, intensification of slave labour
Extensive economic growth and geographical expansion rather than intensive
2. The American Road to Capitalism
Geographical expansion was a rational means to increase output, reduce costs for slave-holders
Slaveholders looked to “frontier” regions for expanding cotton-production, crop cultivation, and staples in the ante-bellum period.
‘the political conflicts that culminated in the US Civil War [were] rooted in the contradictory requirements of the development of industrial capitalism and plantation-slavery’ (The American Road to Capitalism, pp. 153-4).
2. The American Road to Capitalism
‘the American Revolution [1775-1783] was not the struggle of a capitalist class to free themselves and their form of social labour from pre-capitalist restrictions. Rather it marked the success of precapitalist merchants and agricultural classes to establish an independent state for their increasingly pre-capitalist economy’ (p. 250).
The Civil War (1861-65) established and consolidated state-institutions that helped secure the political and juridical conditions for the development of capitalism in the US.
3. What is missing?
How does a social property relations approach account for the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-48?
Post does, briefly, mention conflict over the territories conquered from Mexico, rooting these in the requirements of the reproduction of plantation-slavery and capitalist agriculture (pp. 3, 153). U.S. slaveholders therefore looked to “frontier” regions for extractive purposes (mining), or crops (corn, sugar, cotton, tropical staples).
But was territorial expansion into Mexico a dynamic of “political accumulation” and non-capitalist territorial expansion? Or was it an expression of the spatial expansion of the dynamics of capitalism and, if so, how?
3. What is missing?
3. What is missing?
Does a social property relations approach to the “American road to capitalism” take as given the state as container of territoriality?
What is happening “West of the Revolution”?
Claudio Saunt, West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 (2014).
3. What is missing?
Can a social property relations approach adequately address the contest over Native-American land?
The reproduction of the frontier through the expropriation of Native-American land is mentioned, again briefly. This is presented as a process that short-circuited the parcellisation of landholdings, to avoid declining yields and demographic collapse (pp. 158, 165, 169, 173).
But this is often cast as out-migration to unoccupied lands so that the frontier provided a mechanism to stabilise settler social inequality, reduce land prices, and deliver higher wages.
3. What is missing?
https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJxrTzfG2bo
Further reading:
Charles Post, ‘The American Road to Capitalism’, New Left Review I, No. 133 (May-June 1982): 30-51.
Sébastien Rioux, ‘The Fiction of Economic Coercion: Political Marxism and the Separation of Theory and History’, Historical Materialism, 21:4 (2013): 92-128.
