Promise of Development by Klaren Peter F.; Bossert Thomas J.; & Thomas J. Bossert

Author:Klaren, Peter F.; Bossert, Thomas J.; & Thomas J. Bossert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Frank, on the contrary, maintains that European expansion was thoroughly capitalist from the sixteenth century onwards. He corroborates his assertion with a second quotation from Marx in which the latter declares: “The modern history of capitalism begins with the creation, in the sixteenth century, of world trade and a world market.” But this time Frank happens to have transcribed the quotation badly. In the original, Marx, in fact declares, that: “The modern history of capital dates from the creation in the sixteenth century of a world-embracing commerce and a world-embracing market.”14

Given the distinction emphasized above between capital and capitalism—which permits the coexistence of commercial capital with earlier modes of production—the meaning of this passage is totally different. Marx only says that the enlargement of the world market during the sixteenth century, brought about by overseas expansion, created the conditions and the global framework in which the modern expansion of capital could take place. He takes for granted that anterior forms of capital existed—e.g., in the Middle Ages or in antiquity. But he by no means speaks of capitalism.

The errors of Frank’s conception can be seen from the fact that he has defined capitalism so loosely that he is unable legitimately to derive any concrete consequences from it about anything. This is, of course, not his own belief; he is confident that he can demonstrate on this ground the irrelevance of the bourgeois-democratic stage in Latin America. Let us consider this demonstration. Frank’s basic assertion is that since the task of the bourgeois-democratic revolution is to destroy feudalism, whereas capitalism has always existed in Latin America ab initio, the bourgeois democratic revolution disappears from the revolutionary calendar, and is replaced by a direct struggle for socialism.

But Frank has again confused the terms of the problem. For when Marxists speak of a democratic revolution sweeping away the vestiges of feudalism, they understand by feudalism something very different from Frank. For them feudalism does not mean a closed system which market forces have not penetrated, but a general ensemble of extra-economic coercions weighing on the peasantry, absorbing a good part of its economic surplus, and thereby retarding the process of internal differentiation within the rural classes, and therefore the expansion of agrarian capitalism. This is also what the French revolutionaries of 1789 understood by feudalism when they thought they were suppressing it by abolishing the gabelles and seigneurial privileges. When Lenin speaks of the growing weight of capitalism in the agrarian structure of Russia in The Development of Capitalism in Russia, his aim is to demonstrate a growing process of class differentiation which was gradually producing a class of rich peasants, on the one hand, and an agricultural proletariat, on the other. It would not have occurred to Lenin to base his demonstration of this process on a progressive expansion of production for the market, for such production had precisely formed the source of feudalism in Russia several centuries before, when growing opportunities for commercialized wheat production had led the landowners to increase—indeed to establish—the oppression of serfdom.

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