Dobb ve Sweezy tartışması: Tarım toplumundan kapitalizm ilk defa nasıl ortaya çıktı?
The end of feudalism and the origins of capitalism
Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism, published in 1946, was the first major post-war statement on the origins of capitalism (see also Kaye 1984: chapter 2). In many ways his proposals have defined the debate ever since, including some of the confusion that it has engendered. Dobb made a distinction between the demise of feudalism and the rise of capitalism. He claimed that trade, ‘an alien body within the pores of feudal society’, may have been an important contributing factor to the creation of capitalism, but that it was in itself not a ‘sufficient’ pre-condition for the establishment of a capitalist economy (Dobb 1963: 37– 9). To understand why feudalism declined it was, Dobb claimed, of paramount importance to investigate the ‘forces internal to [the] feudal economy’ (ibid. : 42). Although relatively little was known about this, Dobb speculated that the feudal crisis was a combination of two factors. On the one hand, the manorial economy was incapable of long-term improvement. On the other, the pressures on the peasants to increase their output were rising because the number of lords was increasing, and their armed conflicts (e. g. The Crusades) were requiring ever greater sums of money. Although this pressure was initially absorbed by a rising population and the exploitation of newly cultivated lands, at the same time peasants were escaping from the countryside and seeking their fortunes in the towns. Rising levels of mortality around 1300, i. e. Well before the great outbreak of plague in the middle of the fourteenth century, suggest that a breaking point had already been reached (ibid. : 42– 50).
The crisis of feudalism did not directly lead to capitalism, however. According to Dobb bourgeois capital was accumulated in international trade, thanks to the political privileges and monopoly strategies of the early merchants, for whom the playing field had been levelled by the unravelling of feudalism. In the sixteenth century, merchant capital in England started to penetrate the sphere of petty production, in the seventeenth century the first industrial capitalists were rising from the ranks of petty producers. Capitalism had arrived (ibid. : 18, 70, 88, 109, 126, 134).
This interpretation was challenged by Paul Sweezy, like Dobb a Marxist economist, and not trained as an historian. 3 Sweezy maintained that Dobb’s analysis of the feudal crisis was seriously flawed. Logically, it was unclear how a mode of production that had existed for ages, could transform itself without substantial inputs from outside. Sweezy also accused Dobb of misinterpreting Marx’s own words. This, it seems, was a somewhat ambiguous argument, because in different places in Marx’s writings one finds him emphasizing different elements in the process. In the third volume of Capital, for example, Marx stated unequivocally that ’[i]n the early stages of capitalism commerce dominates industry’ (Marx 1971 Volume 3: 342). He then went on to explain how the Great Discoveries and the development of commercial capital were (ibid. : 345) key moments…in the transition from a feudal system of production to a capitalist. The sudden expansion of the world market, the multiplication of goods in circulation, the competition among European nations to acquire the Asian products and American treasures for themselves, the colonial system, all made crucial contributions to cracking the feudal limitations on production.
In the Grundrisse there is a similar emphasis on the role of money and merchant capital, but at the same time an insistence that this in itself was not enough. For if mere wealth could create capitalism, then Ancient Greece and Rome should have travelled this road earlier (Marx 1964: 109). What was needed to transform monetary wealth into capital was its application to the exploitation of free labour. Hence, capitalism could only develop where a pool of free labour was available. Such a labour market was first created, Marx claimed, in the English countryside ‘when the great English landowners dismissed their retainers, who had consumed a share of the surplus produce of their land; when their farmers drove out the small cottagers, etc. ’ (ibid. : 110– 11).
If Marx proved to be an unreliable ally, Sweezy had another arrow to his bow. Historically, Sweezy said, it could easily be demonstrated that towns and their trade, in other words a cause ‘external to the system’, were crucial in the dissolution of the feudal economy. It was the towns that whetted the appetite for new luxuries among the propertied classes, which in turn forced them to increase the extraction of ever greater revenues from the peasants. At the same time, the towns were setting new standards of productivity and providing an alternative source of income for the oppressed peasants. This exposed the frailty of the feudal economy and created the crisis. Sweezy also pointed out another puzzling aspect of Dobb’s interpretation, which had left a yawning historical gap between the dissolution of the feudal economy in the fourteenth century and the establishment of capitalism around 1600. Somehow it seemed unlikely that the feudal economy, having succumbed to its own internal contradictions, was succeeded by… nothing. Sweezy’s own focus on towns and trade could resolve this problem too.
The Dobb— Sweezy controversy went through a second round of exchanges and was joined by other contributors, before petering out in the mid-1950s. Apart from the unfavourable general political climate, it also suffered from a lack of fresh input of historical data; quotations from Marx will only take one so far (cf. Hilton in Sweezy et al. 1978: 11, 153– 8). The issues it raised, however, did not go away. In the 1970s the two sides re-emerged, albeit in slightly different forms.
Prak, M. R. (2000). Early modern capitalism : Economic and social change in Europe 1400-1800 (pp. 3-4). Florence, KY: Routledge. Retrieved September 4, 2010 from http: //site. ebrary. com/lib/tcmb/Doc?id=10094848&ppg=17
Wallerstein’a göre kapitalizm nasıl ortaya çıktı?
Trade and the emergence of a world-economy
Superficially, the first volume of Immanuel Wallerstein’s Modern World-System looked like a confirmation of the Sweezy position. Critics have been quick to point out the common features between Sweezy and Wallerstein. 4 The similarities are, nonetheless, limited. For one, Wallerstein, although politically an avowed socialist, was far less intellectually dependent on Marx than Sweezy was. 5 Moreover, Wallerstein’s vision was truly global, where Sweezy remained transfixed by the European experience (Ragin and Chirot 1984). As a sociologist specializing in the plight of the young African nations, Wallerstein was less interested in explaining the rise of capitalism as a European phenomenon than in demonstrating the connection between the West’s dominance and the poverty of the Third World.
Wallerstein’s starting point is a simple statement: ‘In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, there came into existence what we may call a European worldeconomy’ (Wallerstein 1974: 15). This world-economy differed from earlier phases of economic expansion, because the space of the world-economy did not coincide with any single political unit. Whereas former world-economies had been transformed into empires, this new world-economy was held together by economic ties. The older worldeconomies had suffered from the tributary demands imposed by the political superstructure. Not so under the new system: ‘What capitalism does is offer an alternative and more lucrative source of surplus appropriation’ (ibid. : 16). By implication, the ‘modern world-system’ equalled capitalism (also Wallerstein 1979: chapter 1). Given these definitions, several questions impose themselves. What preceded this new order? What circumstances caused the transition to capitalism? What was the shape of the new world-economy? Wallerstein describes the feudal economy as a series of ‘relatively small, relatively self-sufficient economic nodules’, strung together by a long-distance trade in luxury commodities. During the fourteenth century, however, the feudal economy was thrown into turmoil as a consequence of conjunctural factors (the available technology had exhausted its potential), of diminishing returns to feudal exploitation, and finally, a climatological turn for the worse, which caused agricultural productivity to decline (Wallerstein 1974: 18, 20, 36– 7; quote on 36). To overcome the crisis, the propertied classes started to look for ways to make up for the loss in income. They found it in the ‘capitalist world-economy’ (ibid., 37).
The establishment of this new order entailed three crucial developments. First and foremost, it required the expansion of what was originally a European world-economy into something truly global. Although this expansion did not necessarily imply that all of the globe was from the very start included into the new capitalist system, significant areas outside Europe in fact were. Second, it led to a divison of this world-economy into different zones, or regions, according to a specific hierarchy of exploitation. The core, semi-periphery and periphery, roughly coinciding with north-western Europe, southern Europe and the non-European worlds respectively, were also characterized by different systems of labour control (Wallerstein 1979: chapter 2; also 1974: 86– 118). A third characteristic of the world-economy was the development of strong state-structures in the core area. As distinct from the economically crippling empires of yore, however, these new states acted to support the new capitalist dynamic.
Although there were some further developments, the basic structure of the capitalist world-economy was in place by the mid-seventeenth century. Thereafter, the system became enmeshed in a series of leadership contests. Initially the Dutch Republic captured the coveted role. It was a sweet, but brief interlude (Wallerstein 1980: chapter 2; also Aymard 1982), before France and Britain entered a long and exhausting struggle for economic and hence political hegemony. Britain, helped by its Industrial Revolution, eventually won out, as confirmed by the French Revolution and its military aftermath (Wallerstein 1989).
For Wallerstein (1979: 15; also 1974: 92), the early modern period is definitely not a specific era in the history of capitalism. He has rejected the idea that the centuries between 1500 and 1800 were a transitional stage, principally because declaring any period in time ‘transitional’ is an expression of muddled thinking. He also rejects the idea of ‘merchant capitalism’, because it suggests an opposition between merchant and industrial entrepreneur, whereas he (Wallerstein 1991: 204) maintains that it is precisely characteristic of the capitalist that he is both. Although in passing he refers to an ‘era of agricultural capitalism’ (Wallerstein 1979: 17), this looks more like a slip of the pen than a serious proposal. Capitalism, Wallerstein (1979: 6) maintains, is a market economy and the division of labour within the world-economy implies exchange throughout the system. Note, however, that capitalism is not necessarily a system of free labour. On the contrary, in the periphery a whole range of non-economic pressures is applied to a labour force, at times reduced not merely to poverty but rather to outright slavery. By implication, the capitalist system is not simply a market economy, where the ‘invisible hand’ does its beneficial work unopposed. In all parts of the system institutions have a role to play, either to maintain the leadership of the core states, or to organize the transfer of surplus from the direct producers to their lords and from the periphery to the core.
Prak, M. R. (2000). Early modern capitalism : Economic and social change in Europe 1400-1800 (pp. 4-6). Florence, KY: Routledge. Retrieved September 4, 2010 from http: //site. ebrary. com/lib/tcmb/Doc?id=10094848&ppg=17
İngiltere neden Fransa’dan önce sanayi devrimine geçti?
In the east, peasant communities were too weak to resist the onslaught of the lords, who were therefore able to impose a new serfdom on territories where initially the peasants had enjoyed greater freedom than anywhere else in Europe. In France, the landowning class was internally divided, and the crown hoped to gain the upper hand in this struggle by supporting (and subsequently taxing) the peasantry. Thus French peasants were able to become quasi-proprietors of the soil they cultivated, which ensured the continuation of the small family plot as the basic unit of French farming. In England the lords dominated the crown and enjoyed full ownership of the greatest share of the cultivated land. Peasant claims were successfully resisted and the landowners created tenant farms on their own terms. The relatively large, efficient farms broke down the selfimposed constraints of the feudal economy. The specific relationship between landlord and tenant-farmer in England was such that both parties would profit from farm investments and improvement of the land.
Prak, M. R. (2000). Early modern capitalism : Economic and social change in Europe 1400-1800 (p. 9). Florence, KY: Routledge. Retrieved September 4, 2010 from http: //site. ebrary. com/lib/tcmb/Doc?id=10094848&ppg=17
Sanayi devrimi şehirlerin nüfusunu nasıl artırdı?
Prak, M. R. (2000). Early modern capitalism : Economic and social change in Europe 1400-1800 (p. 11). Florence, KY: Routledge. Retrieved September 4, 2010 from http: //site. ebrary. com/lib/tcmb/Doc?id=10094848&ppg=17
İngiliz, Alman, Fransız ve ABD sanayi devrimlerinde devletin rolü
The rhetoric of laissez-faire that accompanied British industrialization was problematic for two reasons. First, did not fit the reality of the British case, where the state played a vital role in the transition to capitalist industrialization. Second, laissez-faire was of little use to potential competitors, because &ee trade benefited the already power&l, as established industries could out-perform weak rivals. The work of Frederick List (cf. Cowen & Shenton 1996: 158-65) is significant here. He argued that the collective interest took precedence over the interests of isolated individuals, and that the development of manufacturing was important because it was economically progressive and rested on the use of social, rather than isolated, labour. Manufacturing must therefore be developed as part of the process of nation-building, and this should occur through the use of protectionist measures (tar&, import controls) against foreign competition.
These points were not lost on later industrializers. Private enterprise was still deemed to play a key, leading role in industrialization, but it was to be accompanied by an actively interventionist state. Thus in Germany f?om the 187Os, most major products were regulated by price cartels and import controls. Marketing syndicates were also established, whereby the entire output of member firms was in the hands of a single agency, which effectively eliminated competition. In France too, the market was restricted by the role of the state which promoted the growth of giant industrial complexes which were shielded f?om foreign competition (Kemp 1978: 120-21).
In the United States, the ideology of laissez-faire was more openly embraced. The Constitution adopted the principle of free enterprise (with important qualifications), while “ open” frontiers encouraged the development of family farms producing wheat for the market4 (Byres 1991: 29). As Kemp (1990: 18) states, “ [tlhe state in America was expected to play only a limited role and not to enter the social or economic arena except under very special circumstances” . However, the reality of US industrialization does not confirm the limited government thesis. As early as 1791, the first Secretary of it the Treasury,
Kiely, R. (1997). Industrialization and Development: A Comparative Analysis. London: UCL Press Limited (p. 31). Retrieved September 4, 2010 http: //site. ebrary. com/lib/tcmb/Doc?id=2003690&ppg=33
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