Empire of the periphery is an extremely important book. It attempts
to approach Russian history from a standpoint of Marxism, as informed or
modified by the ‘world-systems theory’ of Immanuel Wallerstein and others. As
such, it raises fundamental questions about ‘historical materialism’ - that is,
about the ‘classical Marxist’ approach to human history, which informs Marxist
political ideas today. And it raises equally fundamental questions about
‘imperialism’: that is, about the origins of the inequality between countries
which is endemic in modern society. For these reasons this review will - very
unusually for a book review - be spread over two issues of the paper.
Empire of the periphery: is an outline history of the
successive polities from the early Rus centred on Kiev, through early modern
Muscovy, to the tsarist empire of the Romanovs, the USSR, and today’s ‘post-
Soviet’ Russian Federation. We tend to call these polities in shorthand
‘Russia’, and I will do so for convenience in this review. But it is worth
bearing in mind several points which make this shorthand misleading. First,
much of what was early Rus is in today’s Ukraine. Second, neither the empire of
the Romanovs nor the USSR was a nation-state of Russian-speakers, even in the
sense that the 10th-11th century Engla land was a nation-state of
speakers of Ænglisc (both identified themselves in cosmopolitan
terms: the tsarist regime as the ‘third Rome’, the successor of Byzantium; the
USSR by its claim to be soviet and socialist). Third, even today’s Russian
Federation, shorn of many of the subordinate nationalities of the tsarist
empire and USSR, is still a multinational political entity - and also does not
include substantial territories populated by Russian-speakers.
Boris Kagarlitsky is not a
specialist professional historian, but a political scientist and activist. Empire
of the periphery is written with present-day purposes in mind: to combat
the revival in today’s Russian Federation of the pre-1917 ‘westerniser’ and
‘Slavophile’ discourses of Russian history. The first blames Russia’s
historical woes and present problems on Russia’s ‘Asiatic backwardness’ and
failure to become more like western Europe. The second (including
Stalinist-nationalist variants) sees them as resulting from attempts to impose
unnaturally ‘western’ or ‘liberal’ ideas on the Slavs.
In place of these
discourses, Kagarlitsky argues that the character of Russian history flows
neither from isolated ‘Asiatic backwardness’, nor from isolated ‘Slavic’
development, but precisely from Russia’s engagement in successive world
systems. This interpretation draws heavily on those of the Bolshevik
medievalist and early-modernist historian, Mikhail Pokrovsky, and of the more
recent ‘world systems theory’ school of Andre Gunder Frank, Immanuel
Wallerstein and others.
‘Westerniser’ and ‘Slavophile’
historical discourses are not part of present political problems in Britain.
There is perhaps a remote analogy to be made with the European engagement of
‘Whig’ historical writing and the Eurosceptic Anglo-Saxonism or isolationism of
the - recently dominant - ‘Tory’ historical writing. But the dominant attitude
of mainstream politicians of all parties is Henry Ford’s ‘History is bunk’.
Government policy, originated under Thatcher and continued under Blair-Brown,
restricts school students as far as possible to learning a little archaeology
of everyday life in primary school and ‘Our finest hour’ (1914-45) in secondary
school. The resulting political problem is not nationalist and liberal
historical schools, but mass historical illiteracy.
Kagarlitsky’s book is
nonetheless important reading for the British left, and not just because
knowledge of world history and that of particular countries is valuable in
itself. In the first place, the multiple groupuscules of the British far left
are heavily defined by particular attitudes to Russian history and in
particular to 1917 and Stalinism. In a certain sense Empire of the periphery
can be read as a narrative of the longue durée origins of 1917, of
Stalinism and of its failure.
Secondly, a grand-sweep or longue
durée history like Kagarlitsky’s is necessarily informed by a
theoretical framework. Single-volume histories of countries ‘from the earliest
times’ have usually been informed by nationalist ideas. HE Marshall’s Our
island story (1905) - reprinted in 2005 after a campaign by the rightwing
Civitas think-tank and The Daily Telegraph - dates from the
high-imperialist period. It is a classic collection of English nationalist
myths for children. More recent books tend to have the same fundamental
nationalist-monarchist structure and character. FE Halliday’s A concise
history of England (1963), though lacking the simple myths, is in the same
strain. Even the Oxford history of Britain, produced by a collective of
professional historians, is structurally shaped by English nationalism and
‘good’ and ‘bad’ kings.1
Whig-Liberal narratives of
‘progress’, like those of the Russian ‘westernisers’, are an alternative. One
or another variant of Marxism is another. As I have already said, Kagarlitsky’s
book is informed by Pokrovsky and the ‘world systems’ school. Both are
debatable: Pokrovsky expressed sharp differences with Trotsky in 1922, before
the emergence of the campaign against ‘Trotskyism’, while the ‘world systems’
school has been attacked from a variety of directions (also including
Trotskyism and Cliffism).
Good or bad, these
theoretical framework assumptions are relevant to present political choices,
and not just in Russia. The Pokrovsky-Trotsky debate turned on ‘permanent
revolution’ and its assumptions, and these issues were then relevant to working
class strategy in the ‘backward’ or ‘colonised’ countries. Trotskyist comrades
think they still are. ‘World systems theory’ was strongly associated at its
birth with semi-Maoist third-worldism. Kagarlitsky draws from it internationalist
conclusions, which ‘official communists’ or Maoists would call ‘Trotskyite’.
But the original founders of the theory remain substantially closer to ‘soft
Maoism’.2
There is, moreover, a real
dispute as to whether such longue durée history is either necessary or
useful to Marxists or leftists. ‘Orthodox historical materialism’, which its
critics blame variously on Engels, Kautsky or Stalin, argues for an original
human primitive communism and a historical succession of class forms (‘Asiatic
mode of production’, slavery, feudalism, capitalism). Within this theoretical
framework longue durée history is useful to political practice in two
ways. In the first place, it helps us to disentangle matters of genuine human
biological nature, or ‘species-being’, from ideologies of ‘eternal’ human
nature, which are produced in support of various class orders.
Secondly, longue durée
history tells us that prior class orders have come to an end (from which we can
infer that capitalism will also come to an end); it can also tell us things
about the processes of transition from one social order to another, which may
be helpful in thinking about the transition from capitalism to working class
rule and so to communism.
In this aspect, ‘orthodox
historical materialism’ has been violently opposed by pro-capitalist academics
in numerous disciplines. It has also been damned both by sub-Stalinist ‘western
Marxist’ academics (whether originally ‘official’ communists or ‘soft
Maoists’); and by the element of the far left which relies on semi-Hegelian
readings of Marx’s method to promote spontaneism, opposition to electoral
political action and workers’ councilism.
To simplify considerably,
some of these opponents argue that the sequence of modes of production in the
theory is ‘Eurocentric’. Others say that pre-capitalist societies are all
pretty much of a muchness and undynamic, and the only real distinction is
between pre-capitalist societies and capitalism. Yet others argue that the
dynamics of capitalist political economy overdetermine all the other
features of social dynamics, so that all the Marx we need can be found in the
volumes of Capital and the drafts (Grundrisse, etc). In fact, on
this view, we only need the parts of these texts which discuss the laws of
motion of capital and not the parts which discuss prior social formations and
the emergence of capitalism.
On the basis of any of these
approaches, longue durée history is a useless diversion: it can be left
to the professional historians. The professional historians, of course, are
commonly not interested, since they are trained by the PhD to focus on
micro-problems and micro-periods ...
Of these three objections,
one - the argument that the sequence of modes of production is ‘Eurocentric’ -
is simply worthless. We might as well argue that modern mathematics is
‘Indocentric’ from the Indian origins of the ‘Arabic numerals’, or
Islamocentric’ from the Muslim origins of algebra. The world today is dominated
by the products of the Mediterranean-European historical development, as
well as its borrowings and thefts from other societies (like gunpowder and
competitive examinations, copied from China). Neither the Taliban nor the
Islamic Republic of Iran - to take extreme examples of opponents of the
corrupting influence of European liberalism - are free from institutional
influences from the European historical development. At the level of trivial
symbols, Ahmadinejad appears in a jacket and trousers, not clothing of the
Safavid or Qajar era. China is ruled by a so-called Communist Party, and Hu
Jintao appears in a business suit, not a mandarin’s robes.
Cards on the table. My
opinion of these questions is, first, that longue durée history is
necessary to any analysis of the near future (usually called ‘the present’).
Second, Pokrovsky had legitimate objections to Trotsky’s outline analysis of
Russian history, though his own analysis does not solve the problems it poses.
Third, world-systems theory is a useful part of such analysis, provided it is
not made into a pure determinism of trade, but tied to the analysis of the
primary mode of extraction of social surplus from primary producers (slavery,
villeinage, wage-labour) and its role in shaping the overall society. The
strengths and weaknesses of Kagarlitsky’s book seem to me to demonstrate all
these points.
Kagarlitsky’s book is
already a summary argument based on a mass of more detailed work. To summarise
further is inevitably to oversimplify; however, to make the attempt is
necessary.
Kagarlitsky begins in
chapter 1, ‘A land of cities’, by locating early medieval Rus in its relations
to riverine trade routes. These ran from the Baltic to the Black Sea via the
Dnepr (linking the Viking trade-piracy nexus in the Baltic, North Sea and north
Atlantic to the Byzantine empire and its trade connections) and from the Baltic
to the Caspian via the Volga (linking it to Iran under the Muslim caliphate and
its trade connections east and south).
Following Pokrovsky against
official Soviet historiography, he argues that the rise of towns, and from them
of the Rus state, was not driven by the development of the internal
division of labour, but by the role of the towns in the trade routes. In this
framework, internal exploitation in Rus took the form of more or less ‘bandit’
taking of tribute in the form of furs and other forest products, and of slaves,
to be sold abroad (it was in this period that the word ‘slave’, from ‘Slav’,
replaced earlier terms3). This integration in long-distance trade
circuits and the surplus that could be skimmed from it and from tribute-taking
for export produced an ‘advanced’ and prosperous urbanism.
In the 13th century,
however, Rus fell into decline (chapter 2). This decline has traditionally been
blamed on conquest by the Mongols (Tatars), but Kagarlitsky points out that
western Europe in the same period, the late 13th to early 14th century, also
experienced a prolonged economic and demographic crisis, culminating in the
Black Death (1348-51). Rather, following Pokrovsky, he argues that what was
happening in Rus was fragmentation into smaller and smaller warring polities
under the impact of feudalisation, comparable - if a little later - to the
‘feudal revolution’ of 11th century France. Meanwhile, the development of the
Rhine trade route in western Europe undermined the significance of the Dnepr
and Volga routes, while the rise of the Hanse confederation of north German
trading cities put pressure on the ability of the north Russian cities,
especially Novgorod, to control the Baltic end of these routes.
Contrary to Pokrovsky,
however, Kagarlitsky does not see a complete collapse of trade in the 14th
century. The principality of Moscow (Muscovy) began to rise in relation to
other micro-states in the area as a client of the Tatars, but also because of
its strategic location on trade routes between Novgorod and the Tatar centres.
What has changed was that the termini of the trade routes were now dominated
“by Germans in the north, and by Italians and Tatars in the south” (p62). There
was a general further development of feudalism. The Novgorodian city-state
‘republic’ was merely a junior partner of the Hanse: its conquest by Moscow did
not close off a ‘western’ option for development. The fall of Constantinople to
the Turks (1452) and the later medieval development of north-south Atlantic
seaboard trade did, however, remove the significance of the Dnepr route.
Ukraine developed into a Polish possession, while Moscow was reoriented to
conquests on the Volga.
This shift was also
accompanied by others. By now, (proto) capitalist urbanisation and the shipping
industry were developing in parts of western Europe. On the one hand, Muscovy’s
social and state structures were falling behind those of the west: a phenomenon
accentuated by the state’s decision in 1517 to identify itself as the ‘third
Rome’ or heir of Byzantium. On the other, the western growth of urbanisation
and the shipping industry created demand for raw materials: Muscovy, and
following it the tsarist empire, was to be integrated in the world economy as
a raw materials supplier.
This analysis supplies
Kagarlitsky with a framework for making sense of the period of Russian history
between the mid-16th century and the mid-19th, in chapters 4 to 9. The
underlying terms of trade were that Russia supplied Atlantic powers with raw
materials - from the 18th century mainly grain - and for some purposes with
manpower for interventions in European wars, while the Atlantic powers supplied
military high technology and competed for political control of the Russian
regime. These different locations in the overall process of production meant
that there was a permanent flow of social surplus product out of Russia
for the benefit of its Atlantic trading partners. A Russian merchant class,
serving a comprador role, backed the tsarist state. Dominance of primary goods
export production, coupled with a flow of surplus value outwards, necessarily
implied a forced-labour regime in Russia itself: the imposition of the ‘second
serfdom’.
In the terms of the Leninist
theory of imperialism, Russia had become a semi-colony. That is, though the
country was juridically independent, its policy and economy were in
substance adapted to the needs of its imperialist sponsors. Meanwhile, it was
also a sub-imperialism, expanding by conquest eastwards and southwards:
“Russians became simultaneously an ‘imperial’ people, proud of their historic
conquests, and an enslaved population, colonial in their essence” (p127).
In the Crimean War, the
tsarist regime sought to alter this relationship by partitioning Turkey in
order to secure Russian control of the Black Sea; just as, in 1904-05, Japan
became an imperialist contender rather than a potential semi-colony by
defeating the Russians and acquiring Korea, first as a semi-colony and then as a
colony. Defeat in the Crimea forced the Russian state to abandon protectionism,
but also to seek to ‘modernise’ and ‘westernise’ as rapidly as possible in the
hope of winning any future war. Russia thus became even more deeply involved,
still as a semi-colony, in the world system. In this period German, French and
British capital were in intense competition for control in Russia, a
competition which by 1914 had been won by the future Entente powers.
The result was intensifying
contradictions - in particular the very rapid growth of an urban proletariat -
which gave rise to the revolution of 1905. This in turn led (after and
alongside the initial repression) to a further deepening of the ‘modernisation’
project. But by 1914 the militant workers’ movement was on the rise again. The
1914-18 war seemed like a way out (chapters 10-12).
The war, of course, produced
the revolution of 1917. In chapter 13 Kagarlitsky deals in a highly
concentrated way with issues which are subject to massive debate in the global
far left: the causes of the victory of the Bolsheviks, the rise of Stalinism,
the Stalinist industrialisation of the USSR and the Soviet victory in World War
II. He argues that the defeats of the tsarist regime were seen as a negative judgment
on the strategy, pursued since Peter the Great, of “integrating Russia into the
capitalist world system”; the revolution was “aimed against both the Russia of
St Petersburg and the entire world system” (pp255-56).
The liberals, he says,
pursued a strategy of modernisation based on the enlightened section of the
capitalist, landlord and state elites. The Russian Social Democrats were also
modernisers, but based themselves on the urban working class. The Bolsheviks in
particular acted simply in the interests of the urban working class.
While this made them “the only party capable of restoring order”, what they
created was at first “a dictatorship of the city over the countryside” (p256).
Their economic policies were “more a reaction to circumstances than the
implementing of a project that had been thought through and formulated in
advance” (pp256-57). The civil war “was fought not only and not so much between
Reds and Whites as between the city and the countryside” (p257), leading to the
creation of a harsh dictatorship.
In the New Economic Policy,
the peasants won their aims (control of the land and of its produce), but the
political regime became increasingly bureaucratic and repressive. Marketisation
enabled some recovery, but not actual modernisation. ‘Modernisation’ within the
capitalist world system, Kagarlitsky points out, is a chimera: “The more
actively the periphery competes, the further it lags behind, and the more it
helps the west to sprint ahead” (p260). After the revolution, “Soviet industry
no longer served the accumulation of capital in the west, but the question
arose of where it would obtain the resources it needed in order to catch up
with the ‘advanced countries’” (p261). Russia was excluded from the world
economy as a result of the revolution, but gradually began in the 1920s to
export grain again to pay for capital imports. The debate in the Russian
Communist Party about economic development, Kagarlitsky argues, was about how
to get hold of the grain for export: Bukharin and his co-thinkers argued for a
gradualist approach in order not to alienate the peasantry; Preobrazhensky and
the lefts for the use of state control as a lever to force more grain out of
the peasantry (‘primitive socialist accumulation’).
Kagarlitsky argues that the turn
which became forced collectivisation was driven by two crises: on the one hand,
the crisis of grain collection in 1927-28, which was due to the state pushing
prices down to extort more surplus from the peasantry; on the other hand, the
crisis of the world market itself, which erupted in 1929. By a series of ad hoc
steps the party leadership round Stalin moved to a policy of war on the
countryside (forced collectivisation) in order to maximise exports, for the
sake of rapid industrial growth. The result was initially chaos, and a shift
further into totalitarianism. By the mid-1930s, however, industrial growth was
beginning to take off on the basis of US-supplied capital equipment; and this
development was enough to allow Russia to win the 1941-45 war. The 1920s,
Kagarlitsky argues, were comparable to the French Thermidor; the turn of
1929-32 was like French Bonapartism, as the state increasingly took on the
forms of ‘empire’.
Chapter 14, ‘The Soviet
world’, covers the period 1945-91. Of all the chapters, it is the least well
articulated with the book’s general argument. Very broadly, Kagarlitsky argues
that the cold war followed from the attempt of the US in 1946-47 to roll back
Soviet control of foreign policy in the eastern European countries. In response,
Moscow ‘sovietised’ eastern Europe, subjecting it to the existing Russian
totalitarian regime: “The centralised system and mobilisational economy set in
place in the 1930s as the Soviet answer to the great depression had been
effective in the times of industrialisation and war. Now, when the country had
already been industrialised, and life had settled into a peaceful pattern,
these methods were simply failing to work” (p288). ‘Reforms’ aimed to deal with
this problem by introducing market elements in the plan tended to weaken the
party bureaucratic elite - as revealed in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The crisis of the 1970s and
the ‘oil price shock’ led the Soviet leadership to a new turn to oil exporting
and large-scale equipment purchases, especially from western Europe. The debt
crisis of the 1980s, however, destabilised the eastern European regimes and the
USSR itself. In the result, the elite under Gorbachev and Yeltsin capitulated
to the USA and IMF, leading to the fall of the regime.
Chapter 15 then surveys
briefly the post-Stalinist regime, identifying it as a return to the place of a
‘peripheral’ capitalist country: a supplier of raw materials and buyer of
technology, which however fast it runs, can never catch up with the centre.
The conclusion: “The experience
of Russian history shows that remaining within the framework of the system
means to condemn oneself to degradation, while to pursue salvation through
separating oneself from the system becomes a sentence of isolation ... For
Russia in the 21st century, as for all of humanity, there is only one way out: to
change the world system” (emphasis added, p325).
And: “One can complain as
much as one likes about an unfortunate past, or dream of a great future. Both
these courses are best suited to ideological neurotics. Those who choose action
need to remember a very simple truth. The fate of Russia is inseparable from
the history of humanity, and we can struggle for a better world for ourselves
only through trying to build a better world for everyone. And this, of course,
can also be said of any country” (p325).
Kagarlitsky’s conclusion
exemplifies the whole of what he is doing in Empire of the periphery:
looking back not to deplore or to celebrate the past, but in order to look
forward. His fundamental conclusion is that Russia’s present problems cannot be
solved except in the framework of an internationalist perspective.
In chapter 13 Kagarlitsky
presents the different varieties of early 20th century ‘moderniser’ asking a
very concrete question of the same sort. Why did the tsarist regime lose,
successively, the war of 1904-05 with Japan and the war of 1914-18 with the
Central Powers? Someone - whether Russian nationalist ‘moderniser’ or Social
Democrat - who asked the question would do so with a view to avoiding a
repetition of these defeats in the future. Kagarlitsky quotes two liberal
commentators who made in 1989 just such a judgement on 1914-18 and 1941-45:
that Stalin succeeded where pre-1914 ministers Witte and Stolypin failed
(pp278-79).
The answer, of course, is
that Russia had failed to ‘modernise’ sufficiently to fight a war with later
19th-20th century military technology: officers were incompetent aristocrats,
the supply chains broke down because of endemic corruption and so on.4
But this is no more than the beginning of an answer. After all, both the German
Second Reich and the Meiji regime in Japan were in the 1850s ‘backward’
countries relative to Britain, the US and France; but in extraordinary leaps
forward they had brought themselves into the ranks of great industrial powers.
So why did the same thing not happen in Russia?
The answer is inevitably
going to have to be further back. It can have one of two characters. The first
is the answer given by Kagarlitsky: Russia was not relatively
economically ‘backward’ in the middle ages, but it was inserted into the
European-dominated world market system which was growing up in the 16th-17th
centuries in a way which ‘semi-colonised’ the country and led it constantly to
lag further and further behind. In contrast, Germany and Japan turned to a
protectionist policy of industrialisation and aggressively imperialist
militarism before they could be incorporated in the world system as
semi-colonies.
The second sort of answer
would say that Russia was, in fact, much more economically ‘backward’ than
Germany or Japan in the 1850s, and hence unable to make the leap to fully
autonomous (imperialist) capitalism in the later 19th century. It is not
difficult to make such an argument: it is symbolised by the presence of the
sickle, long-obsolete as a harvesting tool in western Europe, as the symbol of
the peasantry in the communist hammer and sickle. Population density, literacy,
preponderance of market towns, and communication interconnections were all
massively weaker in tsarist Russia (down to 1917!) than in Tokugawa Japan
before 1867 or 18th-early 19th century Germany.
That, however, merely pushes
the question further back. It is again possible that Russia’s ‘backwardness’ in
the 1850s is attributable to semi-colonial incorporation in the developing
world market in the 16th-18th centuries. But, on the other hand, if we use the
same empirical criteria of ‘development’ listed above, Russia was arguably
already much more economically ‘backward’ than western Europe in the 1500s and,
indeed, in the 1200s, and perhaps even in the 800s.5 Perhaps this is
why, when it was incorporated in the world market, it was incorporated
as a semi-colony rather than as a potential full-capitalist power.
These are, of course, merely
empirical criteria. The point could be formulated in a different and more
‘orthodox Marxist’ way. Thus Trotsky in 1905 and in the History of
the Russian Revolution characterised the tsarist regime as partly
‘Asiatic’: that is, pre-feudal. It was this characterisation, taken from the
liberal historian Miliukov, which produced Pokrovsky’s polemics against
Trotsky. Pokrovsky considered medieval late Rus and early Muscovy to be feudal.
Following that judgment and Lenin’s Development of capitalism in Russia,
he considered that Russia was going through a process of at least partly
endogenous capitalist development, analogous in certain respects to the early
stages of the development of capitalism in western Europe, dominated by merchant
capital.6
There were practical
implications of these divergent views. For Lenin before 1914, a transition to
capitalism in Russia was not out of the question, but in process; the basic
question for the working class was how to make that transition take the form
most favourable to the working class, while the socialist revolution
would be - separately - posed at an international level, mainly in
western Europe. Trotsky’s views, in contrast, implied that a transition to full
capitalism in Russia could not happen; hence, the overthrow of
tsarism would necessarily pose the question of a socialist overleaping of
capitalism in Russia.
Pokrovsky in 1908-11 had
been with the Vpered faction and, though he had returned to the Bolsheviks in
1911, in 1914 had contributed to Trotsky’s Bor’ba.7 But in
his arguments against Trotsky he was basically committed to Lenin’s view on
this issue.
Before 1914 these
differences had operative implications for programme and admissible coalitions,
though in 1917 they were subsumed by Lenin’s and Trotsky’s agreement that
imperialism and the war immediately posed the question of world
revolution.
The debate between Trotsky
and Pokrovsky is thus a variant small part of the debate on ‘permanent
revolution’. This, in turn, is intimately connected to the general issue of the
origin of the systematic inequality between nations which existed then and
continues to exist today; and how to overcome it. Arguments about the origin of
European (and more recently US) dominance have to go back at least to the
middle ages, even if it is only, like Janet Abu-Lughod, to argue that the roots
are no further back.8
In the second half of this
review I will discuss these issues in a little more depth. However, whichever
view is correct, the fundamental point remains. To understand the present and
near future and how to act in relation to it we need to go back not merely to
the recent past, but to locate the present as an outcome of longue durée
history.
1. KO Morgan (ed) Oxford
history of Britain Oxford 1999.
2. In Andre Gunder Frank’s case remained, since he died in 2005.
3. Except in Anglo-Saxon England, where the word for slave was wealh
(Welsh).
4. Kagarlitsky does not, in fact, discuss the tsarist military failure in
1914-17 in any depth. But see, for example, RW Pethybridge The spread of the
Russian Revolution London 1972.
5. For this purpose compare Kagarlitsky’s chapter 1 with C Wickham Framing
the early middle ages Oxford 2005.
6. Pokrovsky’s later summary of his criticisms of Trotsky (1931) is in the
appendix to volume 1 of his Brief history of Russia (Maine 1968); this
summary is almost certainly obscured by the needs of Stalinist orthodoxy as of
1931. Trotsky’s response to Pokrovsky is in 1905, chapter 27: www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1907/1905/ch27.htm
7. Pokrovsky Brief history introduction, piv.
8. JL Abu-Lughod Before European hegemony: the world system AD 1250-1350
Oxford 1991.
This is the second part of
my review of Boris Kagarlitsky’s Empire of the periphery, his history of
Russia and its predecessor-states from the earliest times.1 In the first part I
outlined Kagarlitsky’s narrative. I argued that the modern evidence argued
strongly for Kagarlitsky’s longue durée historical approach to
understanding and attempting to change the immediate future (usually called
‘the present’). I argued also that Kagarlitsky is correct to approach the
problem of Russia’s place in the world not as a unique special case, but
as a particular case of the general problem of inequality between
nations in modern capitalist society.
This, in turn, poses the
question of the appropriate theoretical tools to approach the problem.
Kagarlitsky, as I said last week, uses a broadly Marxist analysis, but one
‘specified’ by the ideas of Bolshevik historian Mikhail Pokrovsky and of the
‘world-systems analysis’ (WSA) of Immanuel Wallerstein and others. Are these
the right tools? After all, Pokrovsky opposed Trotsky’s account of Russian
history and later aligned with the Stalin faction.2 And though
Kagarlitsky draws internationalist conclusions from his analysis, the
world-systems theorists started out as third-worldists and are largely now
believers in a coming period of Chinese world hegemony.
Pokrovsky’s polemic with
Trotsky was at least partly a matter of professional amour propre.
Pokrovsky was a professional historian trained under the eminent medievalist
Paul Vinogradov. In 1910-12 he had edited, and authored most of, a five-volume History
of Russia from the earliest times to the development of commercial capitalism.
Even in the highly abridged English translation3 it is apparent that
this book is one of the classics of the new ‘scientific history’ of the turn of
the 19th-20th centuries. Pokrovsky’s argument for the feudal character of
medieval Russian society and the ‘commercial’ character of the early modern
absolutist regime was based not on ‘orthodox Marxist’ schematism, but, on the
contrary, on deep familiarity with the Russian sources and with the best of the
contemporary historical literature on medieval western Europe.
However, when Trotsky in
1922 reprinted an enlarged edition of some of his contemporary writings as 1905,
he still asserted the ‘Asiatic’ character of the early modern Russian state. In
doing so he was casually following the liberal historian, Miliukov (also a
leader of the Cadet party), without using or engaging with Pokrovsky’s History.
This was sloppy as well as arrogant, and it is understandable that Pokrovsky
should have been somewhat exasperated. Trotsky’s dismissive response to
Pokrovsky’s criticisms in his second edition of 1905 would have
exacerbated the issue.
Professional amour propre
is not always unjustified: on the whole we prefer to have trained pilots flying
planes ... Slightly analogously, professional history, as it developed from the
late 19th century, involves certain specialist skills in reading ancient
documents, making use of the full range of sources available, engaging with the
modern controversial literature and so on. In this context of the technique of
history, Trotsky’s response to Pokrovsky is simply not serious as a historical
argument.
That said, there are
serious historical arguments in favour of the ‘Asiatic’ character of the early
modern tsarist state, or (that is) its character as an independent direct
exploiter, without a real independent landlord class like the west European
late feudal states of the same period. For example, at the level of studies of particular
aspects of the social order, both JM Hittle on the early modern Russian
city and Richard Hellie on slavery present evidence of an economic-social order
in early modern Russia which is qualitatively different from the
economic-social orders of western Europe at this period. Different by an order
of magnitude greater than the differences between, for example, the
economic-social orders of England before 1688 and Germany at the same period.4
The major problem with this
sort of account is the manifest integration in the early modern European trade
system of Russian production and export first of the raw materials for
shipbuilding, and later of grain. So Pokrovsky argued in the relevant part of
his books, and so Kagarlitsky also argues. In this light, the early modern
Russian regime’s ‘Asiatic’ characteristics look more analogous to the (very
different) systems of forced labour which developing capitalism threw up in
various parts of the colonised world.
The underlying political
difference between Pokrovsky’s and Trotsky’s historical approaches, though, is
somewhat distinct. Does an ‘Asiatic’ recent past inherently prevent the
emergence of autonomous capitalism, so as to force a socialist revolution if
the country is to ‘modernise’?
Another argument might have
been made by Trotsky, but was not in the early phase of the debate, though it
became prominent in ‘permanent revolution’ arguments later. This is that the
rise of imperialism precludes the emergence of new autonomous
capitalisms: the only route open to pre-capitalist societies faced with
imperialism is colonisation - or socialist revolution.
The first argument is
plainly false. Though medieval Japan is commonly characterised as feudal,
Tokugawa Japan could as easily be said to be ‘Asiatic’ as the early modern
tsarist regime (this incidentally illustrates the extreme slipperiness of the
‘Asiatic regime’ concept). Yet Japan emerged from the Meiji restoration and the
following period as a full-fledged imperialist power.
Japan is almost certainly
also an answer to the second argument. By the time of the Meiji restoration in
1867 high imperialism was in full flow of development. It is not the only
example. South Korea today is undoubtedly an industrialised capitalist country,
albeit subordinate to the US (but then, who isn’t?). But Korea was actually colonised
in the full sense by Japan in 1910-45.
If we ask why this happened
in South Korea, the answer is fairly obvious: geopolitics. The Chinese
revolution made clear to the US state that imperialism through alliance with
landlords and pre-capitalist religious elites tends to render the society
vulnerable to revolutions of (broadly) a Russian type. In South Korea, the US
responded to the Korean war by forcibly subordinating the old elites and subsidising
the development of a Korean capitalism. Similar subsidies affected other
‘front-line’ states (including Japan and Taiwan) in the cold war period.
In other words, the
emergence of new, fully capitalist societies is not excluded by the phenomenon
of imperialism. But it becomes primarily a question of geopolitics. Can the new
state forcibly - that is, by actual warfare - thrust itself into
relations of semi-equality with existing capitalist regimes and domination over
subordinated-colonised societies, as Britain did in 1689-1714, France in
1791-1815 and in the second empire, Germany under Bismarck, and Japan in the
1890s-1900s? Or will the global capitalist hegemon state’s own motivations lead
it to subsidise a full development of capitalism, as happened with several
front-line states in the cold war period?
Within that framework,
however, there is another issue. The ability to act as a great power, both
(apparently) in geopolitical competition vis-à-vis the capitalist great
powers and by subordinating other countries, does not in itself mean a
development of full capitalism: Russia in the 18th-19th centuries is precisely
an example of the point, since it was unambiguously a great power and an
‘imperial’ one, yet ‘sub-imperialist’: ‘semi-colonised’ successively by the
Netherlands, and by Britain and France.
The problem, to be blunt,
was that the domestic development of the forces of production in the
Russian core was insufficient to allow a transition to autonomous industrial
capitalism comparable to the transitions in Germany and Japan: back to the
point, made in the first part of this review, about the low density of
population, market nodes and communications.
To talk of a ‘global
capitalist hegemon state’, as I did just now, is to use the language of
world-systems theory. But to explain Russia’s failure to achieve autonomous
industrial capitalism by insufficiency of the domestic development of the
forces and relations of production may seem to be the opposite of the
world-systems approach, and in a certain sense it is.
World-systems theory
originated with attempts to explain the world as it appeared in the 1970s,
looking back on developments since the 1950s.
Through the post-war period
of decolonisation and cold war it had more or less been orthodoxy, both ‘west’
and ‘east’, that the ‘developing countries’ could follow the 19th century US,
French, German or Japanese path to ‘development’ through tariff protection of
national industries for import-substitution. The ‘Soviet bloc’ approach to the issue
was considerably more statist than ‘western’ approaches, but the present
orthodoxy that free trade and free capital markets are the road to development
was marginal.
By the 1970s, however, it
was clear that at least the ‘western’ versions of this policy were not
producing a reduction in international inequality. As Kagarlitsky puts it in Empire
of the periphery, “[t]he more actively the periphery competes, the further
it lags behind, and the more it helps the west to sprint ahead” (p260).
The sharpest case was that
of Latin America. The South American states had mostly been formally
independent since the early 19th century, when they gained independence from
Spain. Over a century of formal sovereignty had not allowed a breakthrough into
‘development’, and, indeed, it was clear from US conduct in the 1950s and 60s
(and spectacularly in the 1973 US-sponsored coup in Chile) that the US regarded
the sovereignty of South American states as limited, just as the ‘Brezhnev
doctrine’ held that the sovereignty of eastern European states was limited (the
US, of course, still regards the sovereignty of South American states in
this way).
The Soviet- or Chinese-style
alternatives, as they appeared in the 1970s, produced a degree of equality both
internally and between separate Stalinist countries by ‘levelling down’. No
Stalinist bureaucrat ever enjoyed material privileges or individually
autonomous power comparable to the high capitalist elite in the ‘west’ or even
in the ‘south’, and there was, indeed, national development (of steel
mills, arms factories, etc) in each separate Stalinist country, though those in
eastern Europe were politically subordinate to the USSR. But they did
not achieve material equality with the capitalist metropolises of the ‘west’
or, for that matter, with front-line states, like South Korea, which were
sponsored into capitalist development by the US.
Arising from these factual
circumstances - which are quite plain and continue to exist to this day - there
developed theories of ‘dependency’ and ‘unequal exchange’ which explained the
systemic international inequality by features of capitalist international trade
as such, rather than by the specific forms of high imperialism. (The
Leninist theory of imperialism continued to be used by the far left, and by
Soviet and ‘official communist’ theorists in the bastardised form of ‘state
monopoly capitalism’). These theories were developed first in Latin America.
One might add Eric Williams’ arguments in his Capitalism and slavery (1944)
for the role of super-exploitation of colonial slaves in funding the industrial
revolution in Britain.
Wallerstein, in a recent
short introduction to the approach, explains the emergence of world-systems
analysis as growing from a combination of dependency theory with three other
sources. The first was the rejection of the ‘Eurocentric’ conception of a
linear series of stages of historical development, which he identifies as
having resulted from Soviet scholars’ re-engagement with the concept of the
‘Asiatic mode of production’ after Stalin’s death in 1953, to some extent
lifting the lid on this issue. The second was Paul Sweezy’s side of his debate
with Maurice Dobb on the origins of capitalism (1946 and following): Dobb
argued that capitalism grew ‘endogenously’ out of the internal dynamics of
feudalism in Britain; Sweezy that the European-wide development of
international trade was more central. The third was the French Annales
school of historians, and in particular the arguments of Fernand Braudel
(1902-85) for longue durée history, as opposed to histoire
événementielle, the history of events (which usually turned out to be
events in state history) and for treating the 16th century Mediterranean
as a whole without regard to state boundaries.5
The core of the resulting
argument is that at least the capitalist ‘world system’ has to be analysed as
a whole, before approaching the specific features of distinct ‘national’
economies. When this is done, it will appear that the system as a whole
inherently produces differentiation between ‘core’, ‘semi-periphery’ and
‘periphery’ economic activities, which is reflected both on the systemic scale
and within the ‘national’ economies. The key to this differentiation,
Wallerstein argues, is the degree of monopolisation of these activities, with
high monopolisation yielding high profits and capitalist accumulation.
Monopolisation in turn depends partly on state interventions.
The system has duration
in the longue durée: there is a past in which it did not exist
(variously identified by different world-systems authors), and it will fall
into decline. Moreover, its appearance was not inevitable: according to
Wallerstein, we have to ask (unlike Marx), why the capitalist world
system appeared, not assume that it was a natural outcome of earlier development.6
Capitalism depends on a
particular sort of relation to the state: the state must be powerful enough to
support monopolisation, but not so powerful that state actors are able to
pursue their own goals at the expense of those of the capitalists. This, in
turn, entails the system of capitalist states and the emergence and
decline of successive capitalist world hegemons (Netherlands, Britain, US).7
The world-systems approach
has both great strengths and catastrophic weaknesses. The strengths are essentially
three. The first is that it constitutes a break with the erroneous
‘methodological nationalism’ shared by nationalist historians, economic
historians, and pro-capitalist economists outside the Austrian school.
Methodological nationalism is expressed in Marxist writing as ‘stages theories’
of national development and ‘national roads to socialism’; the so-called
‘law of uneven development’ and its pseudo-internationalist version, the ‘law
of uneven and combined development’; and the idea that ‘the imperialist chain
breaks at the weakest link’.
More recently, Robert
Brenner and his school’s critique of WSA and alternative approach to the
emergence of capitalism is essentially grounded in methodological nationalism.8
Methodological nationalism is also reflected in Brenner’s studies of the world
economy in the 1990s-2000s: in reality based on country-by-country treatment of
the ‘separate but interrelated’ economies of a group of countries, and at that
only - in WSA terms - ‘core’ countries.9
The second strength, which
is related, is the strength of the empirical evidence. In the first place, WSA
addresses the persistence of the phenomena of international inequality and the
diversity of their forms through the 20th century more successfully than either
the classical Leninist theory of imperialism or ideas of an ‘imperialism of
free trade’.10 Secondly, the approach gets to grips with (I will not
say fully explains) the abundant evidence for urban wage labour,
monetisation of the economy, economic integration through trade, etc from
Europe in the late medieval and early modern period, and the emergence at
this period of sharpened inequality between nations. In particular, it
integrates the early modern mercantile empires far more successfully than do
‘orthodox’ attempts to handle them while clinging to the idea that imperialism
is the ‘highest stage of capitalism’. This aspect is central to Kagarlitsky’s
use of WSA arguments.
The third strength is the
integration of the state and world trade in an economic account which is somewhat
Marxisant. It is clear that Marx intended to integrate the state and
world trade at a future stage in his critique of political economy, of which
the extant parts of Capital are merely a fragment.11 But many
Marxists after Marx have read the extant parts of Capital without
attention to the fact that the project is radically incomplete. This produces
the impression that it is possible to explain the laws of motion of capital without
the state and the system of particular states, or with the state merely sitting
in the background as an abstract, dematerialised enforcer of property rights
and contracts.
I do not think WSA actually succeeds
in integrating the state in political economy; in fact, Wallerstein’s attempt
to do so in terms of monopoly seems to me clearly unsound, as I will explain
below, while Giovanni Arrighi’s The long 20th century (1994) more or
less admits failure, by leaving the state as an unexplained ‘territorial logic
of domination’. But the WSA theorists are right that the role of the state must
be incorporated if political economy is to approach the concrete.
In its original 1970s form,
WSA supported the third-worldist project of the global ‘south’ delinking from
the global ‘north’. This project was an utter failure, for two reasons. The
first is the same as the reasons for the failure of Stalinism, which
Kagarlitsky discusses (summarised in the first part of the review, last week),
and in fact follows from WSA’s own recognition of an integrated world economy
and the role of the relative power of states in structuring this economy.
For a ‘peripheral’ state to
‘delink’ without ‘modernising’ is therefore merely to invite military conquest
either by a state higher up the world hierarchy or by a local rival. So it is
necessary to ‘modernise’. But to ‘modernise’, the ‘peripheral’ state needs to
acquire armaments, techniques and material means of production from the states
higher up the global hierarchy. This requires insertion in the world economy.
And since the ‘peripheral’ state ex hypothesi does not possess these
goods monopolised by the ‘core’, the only means of insertion is to bring to the
world market ‘peripheral’ economic activities (agriculture, mining, etc, and in
recent times textile production and assembly work).
‘Delinking’ as a real
project actually only made sense when coupled to linking with the Soviet bloc;
but at the time when the first WSA books were being written, the Soviet bloc
was already in process of (a) breaking up due to the contradictions between the
different national sections of the Stalinist bureaucracies and (b) their
competitive insertion in the global capitalist system. Now, of course, it is
gone.
Second, WSA defined and
still defines the primary axis of inequality in the world as that between
countries, and radically downgrades the possibility of global solidarity among
members of the same class. Wallerstein’s 2004 book offers a ‘deconstruction’ of
the language of class through discussion of household income and the usual post-modernist
‘multiple identifications’,12 an aspect of this general approach.
Let us assume, solely for
the sake of argument, that these objections to the Marxist case for the leading
role of the working class are defensible. (In fact, they are unsound: the objection
is an objection to syndicalist concepts of ‘class’, not to the Marxist
conception.13) Even on that assumption, Wallerstein’s argument to
minimise class solidarity focuses solely on the subaltern classes,
especially workers. But the fatal flaw of the delinking project was not the
negative fact that we lack class solidarity of the proletariat. It was the
positive fact that the world is characterised by international class solidarity
of the capitalist class and related elites.
The flight of capital from
the leftist and delinking projects of governments in the global south is as
much a matter of the native elites pulling out as of the foreign direct
investors; and the US finds no difficulty in building support for its political
projects in Latin America among Venezuelan students and managers, Bolivian and
Colombian landlords. Equally, the fall of the USSR was as much as anything else
an aspiration of sections of the bureaucracy to become one with the global
class elite.
With the USSR fallen, WSA is
a significant academic niche product, but it cannot be a serious political
project. What is left behind is the illusory belief that the rise of China will
produce a better world order. It is most unlikely that China can become the
next world hegemon - it is too far behind the US in military capability and in
the depth of capitalist development which underpins military capability.
Moreover, China’s entry into the export of capital to Africa and Latin America
so far shows no sign of being anything other than the rise of a new imperialist
power. Nor should we expect anything else: Korean and Vietnamese history have
plenty of stories to tell us about great-Han racism to parallel European
racism, and Tibet and Xinjiang/East Turkestan can tell us stories about it even
today.
Underneath this practical
political problem with WSA is theoretical incoherence. This incoherence
consists in the fact that a critical strength of WSA is its attempt to grasp
the global material division of labour. Yet when WSA authors analyse the
economic, the linkage between the material division of labour and the monetary
economy disappears. This linkage can only be a classical (Smith-Ricardo) or
Marxist labour theory of value. The reason is that marginalist equilibrium economics,
which Wallerstein adopts,14 inherently dematerialises the
money economy. It does so because it fails to recognise the actual physical
limits on the working day and minimum subsistence levels which are expressed in
the labour theory of value by the need to exchange at prices which will allow
for reproduction.
Arising from this rejection
of the labour theory of value is an inability of the WSA theory to do what
Wallerstein claims it can: distinguish between the capitalist world system and
prior social orders. Wallerstein defines capitalism as accumulation for
accumulation’s sake, an idea borrowed from Marx.15 The role of money
and markets is silently assumed in this definition, and not explained.
An ancient elite slave-owner accumulated slaves, livestock and land for
accumulation’s sake, because he (sic)16 was compelled to do so by
the internal greasy-pole competitive dynamics of the slave-owner elite. The
same is true of an elite feudalist’s accumulation of manors or a pastoralist’s
accumulation of cattle and wives/slaves.
Arrighi defines capitalism
by the circuit M-C-C’-M’, which is similarly borrowed from Marx. But he leaves
out the critical issue of the form of the process represented by the stage
C-C’. On Arrighi’s definition, therefore, an urban petty artisan producer
integrated in a local market, or a long-distance trader who uses only family
and slave labour, in a society dominated by slavery or serfdom, is a
‘capitalist’. In a capitalist society, of course, such a person is in a
sense a capitalist - a small one, or ‘petty-bourgeois’ - because the logic
of the society as a whole works in that way. Put the same person in a
pre-capitalist society and he (sic) is not governed by capitalist logic, but
will invest any substantial surplus, not in expanding the business, but in
land, public office or whatever else is the primary and most reliable source of
surplus in that society.
This may sound like the
Brennerites’ objection to a trade-centred account of the origins of capitalism
- which is derived from the Dobb line as opposed to Sweezy from the debate of
the 1940s, and is in turn very similar to the objections which were made in the
early 1930s to Pokrovsky’s use of ‘merchant capitalism’ to explain the early
modern tsarist regime.17 This criticism is derived from Marx’s
casual comments about ‘merchant capital’, especially in Capital Vol 3,
chapter 20.18 As Wallerstein points out, this is merely to criticise
WSA for not conforming to Marxist orthodoxy, without questioning whether
Marxist orthodoxy is actually correct.19
In fact, I am not using it
in this way. My point is that the WSA theorists - or, at least, Wallerstein -
claim to be able to identify what is new about the modern world system;
but Wallerstein’s definition of capitalism in fact precludes such an analysis
(as does Arrighi’s). The problem is reflected in Janet Abu Lughod’s
construction of a 13th century ‘world system’ in Before European hegemony
(1991), meaning by it simply the existence of Eurasian circuits of
long-distance luxury trade. This is generally recognised as a ‘bridge too far’
for WSA. So, all the more, is Andre Gunder Frank’s millennia-long
world system in ReOrient (1998), which even Wallerstein rejects.
The issue of ‘merchant
capital’ is nonetheless of substantive importance. The use which has been made
of Marx by Brennerite and other critics of trade-centred explanations of the
emergence of capital seems to me unsound.
Marx’s argument in Capital
Vol 3, chapter 20 is that merchant capital, by organising exchange between
‘undeveloped’ countries and regions, stimulates handicraft production and later
manufacture at both ends of the transaction; as a result, industry emerges in
these countries and regions, and merchant capital finally become subordinated
to industrial capital. In England Marx dates this subordination to the repeal
of the Corn Laws (1846). In the context of this argument there is a great deal
of talk about the unproductive character of merchant capital, its connection
with cheating, coercion, etc.
At the very beginning
of the argument, however, Marx says that “nothing could be more absurd than to
regard merchant’s capital ... as a particular form of industrial capital, such
as, say, mining, agriculture, cattle-raising, manufacture, transport
...” (emphasis added). These are productive activities. Merchant capital, in
contrast, is concerned specially with circulation.
But when we consider
“merchant capital” down to the modern era, it is precisely connected with transport,
whether by pack-train, wagons or - most importantly - ships. This is
true down to the era of the steamship lines, which required more capitalisation
than mercantile shipping could supply. And transport is indeed - as Marx
indicates, aside, in the quote - a productive activity. It moves material
goods from places where they have no use-value to places where they do have
use-value, quite irrespective of the exchange-value aspect of the operation.
The same is true of warehousing, which ‘moves’ goods in time, from times where
they have no use-value to times where they do. The circuit of the
shipper-merchant or warehouser-merchant’s capital is not, as Marx suggests in
places in the chapter, M-C-M’, but M-C-C’-M’.
The question, then, is what
is new about the impact of commerce in the later medieval to early
modern period. The answer is at least partly a question of scale. The luxury
trade supported by the surplus available to the varied medieval elites of
Eurasia, discussed by Abu-Lughod, was small-scale and could be transported and
warehoused by family and domestic slave labour. Larger-scale transportation
remained a state activity.
In contrast, late medieval
and early modern shipping begins to move bulk raw materials to be worked up
elsewhere. In doing so, it reshapes the economies both of the raw material
producer ‘periphery’ and of the handicraft or manufacturing ‘core’.
What makes this possible is
larger ships. And these larger ships are both built by, and sailed by,
wage-labourers engaged in cooperative activity under capitalist managers. Capitalism
in its modern sense, accompanied by proletarianisation, spreads outwards from
the shipping industry.20
The technology is not on its
own determinative. China in the 15th century possessed - if anything - a higher
shipping technology than western Europe. But in that country the imperial state,
based on the scholar gentry, intervened to reduce the impact of shipping
on a highly regulated domestic economy and break off contacts with the outside
world.21 China as a result remained ‘closed’ until the European-led
capitalist world-system had built up enough power to break into it by military
force in the Opium Wars (1839-42 and 1856-60). In Europe, several individual
states attempted to impose controls on trade for the benefit of social order,
but none of them were individually strong enough to maintain them, and in the
Netherlands and Britain successively capital obtained political power.
Hence, Pokrovsky’s early
critics on the question of ‘merchant capital’ were wrong, and Brennerite
insistence that it is only wage-labour in agriculture that triggers the
emergence of capitalism is also wrong. What is involved is a complex interplay
of the development of the forces of production (population growth, ship
technology), the relations of production (the availability of ideas of
property, contract and in particular of free labour and the labour contract)
and state actions.
WSA’s theoretical
incoherence is immediately connected to the problem of the state. Arrighi, as I
said, leaves the state as an unexplained ‘territorial logic of power’.
Wallerstein attempts to integrate the state in the economy through the question
of monopoly and quasi-monopoly. But the process begins with the argument that
“a totally free market, were it ever to exist, would make impossible the
endless accumulation of capital”, because “in such a perfect market, it would
always be possible for the buyers to bargain the sellers down to an absolutely
minuscule level of profit.” The provision of quasi-monopolies by state backing
is then what enables capitalists to make profits. But this argument rests
simply on marginalist/equilibrium assumptions - leave aside the fact that not
even the maddest marginalist imagines that “perfect market conditions” can
possibly exist.
Not all monopolies or
quasi-monopolies depend on state backing. Take intellectual property rights
(IPRs) which Wallerstein uses as a prominent example because they are today
important in the transfer of social surplus product from the periphery to the
core. IPRs can perfectly well exist as the legally unprotected possession of
trade secrets, and in the earlier history of capitalism this was their
predominant form.22 They continue to exist in this form wherever -
for example - ‘core country’ technicians have to be employed in high-tech industrial
operations in ‘periphery countries’ because of the skills which they carry in
their heads (a possessory form of IPR).
Or - more critically to
theory - take money. Money can only be money to the extent that it is scarce.
Otherwise, it could not serve as a store of value, and if it could not serve as
a store of value, it could not serve as a means of exchange (as we have
recently seen in Zimbabwe). Money thus necessarily behaves as a
‘quasi-monopoly’ from the standpoint of ‘perfect market’ assumptions. Now in
fact money is ‘public’ and therefore normally state money even when it is
gold and silver coins, and doing anything more complex with the money
quasi-monopoly does require state intervention in the form of the
enforcement of debts.
This, in turn, has important
implications for the problem of international inequality. At the end of the day
capitalists accumulate and monopolise money. To do so they need a state
standing behind them to enforce debts and property rights. The relative
strengths and geographical reach (navies, etc) of states affect their ability
to do so - and hence the ‘strength’ of the currencies states issue and their
roles in international transactions. This, in turn, is probably more decisive
to the creation of world hegemon states and the subordination of ‘periphery’
countries than the variable quasi-monopolies in IPRs and forms of productive
activity which Wallerstein discusses. But money quasi-monopoly phenomena do not
fit at all with Wallerstein’s marginalist theory of monopoly, and by excluding
the labour theory of value he has also abandoned the possibility of a theory of
money.
I said that ‘underneath’ the
practical political problem is theoretical incoherence. But in a sense the
issue works the other way round. Precisely because WSA is a theory which
sees inequality between nations as more important than class inequality, and
was originally intended to lead to a statist and class-collaborationist project
(of ‘delinking’) in the ‘peripheral countries’, the theory cannot admit the
labour theory of value, because this theory internally implies that class
ordering is foundational and inequality between nations secondary to the
structure of the economy. But the resulting theory is internally incoherent
because it both strives to explain the international material division of
labour and the political-economic role of states, and disables itself from
doing so.
Can we have a form of WSA
without identifying inequality between nations as more important than class
inequality, and hence abandoning Marxist class analysis and producing
incoherent theory? The answer is unequivocally yes. The strengths of WSA I have
identified above - rejection of methodological nationalism, consistency with
the historical empirical evidence, and insistence on the role of the state in
the political economy - are perfectly consistent with Marx’s, or Marxist, core
claims. The role of states in the political economy is certainly an unsolved
problem of Marxist theory, but it is more likely to be tackled effectively on
the basis of Marxist arguments than on the basis of those offered by
Wallerstein and others. The weaknesses are products of the WSA authors’
third-worldist, class-collaborationist political projects.
Is Kagarlitsky’s use of WSA
such a form? This question is more problematic, and interrelates with the
question of Kagarlitsky’s use of Pokrovsky.
On the negative side, the
critical issue is Russia’s entry into the emergent capitalist world system as a
(peculiar sort of) ‘periphery country’ in the 16th century. As I said earlier,
Kagarlitsky follows Pokrovsky in arguing that before this entry, Russian
society was more or less analogous to western European feudal society. But,
though I said that Pokrovsky’s book was a classic of the ‘scientific history’
of around 1900 and informed by a deep knowledge of the sources, that is not the
same thing as saying that it is true; and I drew attention to some
contrasts which could be made in relation to both the forces of production and
to the relations of production.
In form medieval
Russia looked like a feudal society. Pokrovsky analogised the 13th century
collapse of Kievan Rus to west European feudal development from the 11th-12th
century, and so does Kagarlitsky. But the level of the forces of production -
population and communications density - in later medieval Russia looks more
like the less developed parts of early medieval Europe.23
WSA authors tend to downplay
the significance of the development of the forces of production - too much like
‘classical Marxism’. But when we are asking the question why a
particular country was incorporated in the world system as a ‘periphery’ rather
than as a ‘core’ country the question is unavoidable. In this respect, it seems
to me, Kagarlitsky has not thought his way fully beyond the limitations of WSA.
On the other hand,
Kagarlitsky displays a much stronger sense of the internal class dynamics, not
only of 20th century Russia, but also of the preceding class forms, than
‘classic’ WSA allows. And, at the end of the day, he deploys the Soviet
experience precisely to display the bankruptcy of the ‘delinking’ conception
and to propose an internationalist approach. This is an enormous strength and
demonstrates precisely how a version of WSA working in a Marxist framework can
be of practical political use.
1. B Kagarlitsky Empire
of the periphery: Russia and the world system London 2007; first part of
this review: ‘Studying the past to grasp the future’ Weekly Worker April
2.
2. Though Stalin in the end made Pokrovsky into an unperson, Pokrovsky, like
the jurist Piotr Stuchka, died too early to be ‘trashed’ before his death or
liquidated. Introduction to M Pokrovsky Brief history of Russia Orono
1968. On Stuchka see R Sharlet, PB Maggs, P Beirne (eds) introduction to PI
Stuchka: selected writings on law and Marxism New York 1988.
3. JD Clarkson, MRM Griffiths, London 1931.
4. JM Hittle The service city Cambridge, Mass 1979; R Hellie Slavery
in Russia 1450-1725 Chicago 1982.
5. I Wallerstein World systems analysis: an introduction Durham NC 2004.
On Braudel, Wallerstein refers particularly to The Mediterranean and the
Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II (1949) though Capitalism and
material life 1400-1800 (1979) is closer to WSA’s theoretical approach.
6. I Wallerstein op cit pp16-19 is a conveniently transparent summary.
7. I Wallerstein op cit chapters 2 and 3.
8. Brenner’s essays are collected in Property and progress: the historical
origins and social foundations of self-sustaining growth London 2009.
9. R Brenner The economics of global turbulence London 2005; and The
boom and the bubble London 2003.
10. More on this in my July-August 2004 Weekly Worker series on
imperialism, available among other articles on the topic at www.cpgb.org.uk/theory/imperialism.htm
11. For more on this see my 2006 article, ‘Law and state as holes in Marxist
theory’: Critique Vol 34, pp211, 221-222 and literature cited there.
12. I Wallerstein op cit pp32-38.
13. On this see my Revolutionary strategy London 2008, pp29-30.
14. I Wallerstein op cit pp25-26.
15. I Wallerstein op cit p24: “The system gives priority to the endless
accumulation of capital.” The use of the word ‘capital’ does not evade the
problem stated in the text, because without the LTV and Marx’s theory of money,
which Wallerstein does not use, slaves, cattle and land are just as much
‘capital’ as money is in capitalism. Marx: “Accumulate, accumulate! That is
Moses and the prophets!” (Capital Vol 1, chapter 24, section 3: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm).
16. I write ‘sic’ here and later because, though there were female
slave-owners, etc, they were relatively rare; and pre-capitalist social orders
normally anticipated that elite decision-makers would be male; the same is, if
anything, more strongly true of the petty proprietors.
17. Brief history (see note 1) appendix to Vol 1, has Pokrovsky’s
(partially self-critical) responses to these criticisms, as well as his
criticism of Trotsky.
18. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch20.htm
19. I Wallerstein op cit p20.
20. Compare, for a relatively late stage of the process, P Linebaugh, M Rediker
The many-headed hydra London 2000.
21. Abu-Lughod (pp343-45) argues that this is attributable to an economic
collapse in China due to the effects of severance of the land trade route
through central Asia by Tamerlane; she admits, however, on the basis of the
earlier literature (itself based on Chinese sources) that the decision to close
down was taken by the state and influenced by fear of foreign influences.
22. See ‘A bridge too far’ Weekly Worker December 18 2003; and
literature cited there.
23. As I said in the first part of this review, compare Kagarlitsky’s chapter 1
with C Wickham Framing the early middle ages Oxford 2005.