The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development by Lebowitz Michael

Author:Lebowitz, Michael [Lebowitz, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Published: 2010-07-01T07:00:00+00:00

That was the “secret” discovered in the New World by the political economy of the Old World: The conditions necessary for the reproduction of a set of productive relations differ according to whether there is in existence an organic system or whether that system is in the state of becoming.33

Alternative Paths?

If a capitalist mode of regulation is required before capitalism has developed upon its own foundations, nothing requires it (or, indeed, the rupture of property rights or the seizure of production) to be identical in all countries where capitalism emerges. In discussing the process of “becoming” sketched out in Capital, we are not considering a logical process but rather a specific historical path. Insofar as new relations of production “do not develop out of nothing, nor drop from the sky, nor from the womb of the self-positing Idea; but from within and in antithesis to the existing development of production and the inherited, traditional relations of production,” the possibility of alternative paths is obvious.34

Marx was absolutely clear that the original (or primitive) accumulation of the elements that form capitalist relations of production did not have to follow the classic form it took in England. Although it is the basis of the process, he wrote in his initial editions of Capital, the expropriation of the peasant “in different countries, assumes different aspects, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different periods.” That recognition of the possibility of alternative paths became stronger in the French edition, in which Marx explicitly limited the account in Capital to “all the other countries of Western Europe.” He reinforced this point a few years later in a letter, insisting that “the chapter on primitive accumulation claims no more than to trace the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist economic order emerged from the womb of the feudal economic order.”

Do not transform “my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of the general course fatally imposed on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves placed,” Marx demanded.35 Indeed, Marx became increasingly conscious of historical contingency in his later years as he closely studied communal land ownership in Russia and elsewhere. In his ethnological notebooks, he noted that it was wrong to describe “the dissolution of communal ownership of land in Punjab as if it took place as an inevitable consequence of the economic progress in spite of the affectionate attitude of the British toward this archaic form. The truth is rather that the British themselves are the principal (and active) offenders responsible for this dissolution.” Similarly, in his draft letters to Vera Zasulich, he stressed that “what threatens the life of the Russian commune is neither a historical inevitability nor a theory; it is state oppression, and exploitation by capitalist intruders whom the state has made powerful at the peasants’ expense.”36

Yet Marx was not questioning what was necessary for capitalism to emerge—only the insistence that it had to happen in a particular way.

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