Jairus Banaji's Theory as History

There is a huge amount of historical material and review of historiographical literature in this work, the emphasis in these notes falls more on the theoretical end

Chapter One Introduction: Themes in Historical Materialism

1 For Marx, a mode of production is a form of domination and control of labour and is bound up with a wider set of class relations expressive of them and their social functions.

Social forms and class divisions specific to the historical phase they belong to arise but equally they are capable of subsuming earlier forms as an intrinsic part of their own development, according to an inherent dynamic that works itself out in capitalism’s laws of motion.

1.1 Questions of theory

6 Banaji aims to bring a greater degree of complexity to our conception of a mode of production, stripping the theory of its static evolutionism to grapple with more complex trajectories, rather than slavery -> feudalism -> capitalism; there are large parts of the world where capitalism emerges without these antecedents.

7 Similarly we need to integrate the expansion of the monetary economy in antiquity; Roman money went far beyond coinage to incorporate loans and big money capital.

8 - 9 Singles out Perry Anderson’s Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism as an example of the kind of text he is seeking to supersede, written by a sociologist depending on the work of other historians with an inadequate grasp of the actual sources, leading him to make the erroneous case that slavery was the reason for the fall of the Western Roman Empire, not a position outlined by any historians of the period; in fact slavery remained widespread in the late empire, has little to do with the crisis of the fifth century.

12 Marx tended to periodise capitalism into manufacture versus large-scale industry, ignoring merchant capital as an antediluvian form, but Banaji makes the case that it was in the expansion of commercial capital in the middle ages that capitalism emerges, Marx even seems to concede this at points.

13 The upshot is that free labour is not a precondition for the acumulation of capital, but rather a contingent outcome of struggles to shape the law and social relations behind it, and neither is the abscence of coercion a precondition for the deployment of free labour itself.

Important to grasp that free and unfree labour are not mutually exclusive; large parts of Volume I are devoted to the state coercion utilised on wage labourers.

16 - 22- Criticises Marx’s model of the Asiatic mode of production, which he characterises as not possessing a class that arises organically from society in order to control and dominate the state, Marx maintained Asian despotism lacked intermediate and independent classes between soverign and mass of the population that the aristocracy was a create of the soverign and unlike any equivalent group in Europe, also that there was an abscence of private property in land; he later changed his mind about this on encountering better sources.

Banaji draws on more contemporary historiography to describe the ’tributary mode of production’, as a more adequate name for what Marx is trying to get at, namely a mode of production in which the state controls both the means of production, the ruling class and has ‘unlimited disposal over the total surplus labour of the population’.

23 This sounds anamolous because Marx’s accounts of the state have always focused on the capitalist states, in which state power and class interests are analytically independent, but this does not apply in tributary contexts, e.g. the Muscovite state.

26 - 7 The bureaucratic élite is therefore hugely integrated into the state, class struggle between them is not aristocracy v absolutism but factions among magnate families.

30 - 7 In no sense did this render the mode of production static or backwards, as can be seen in China where the state encouraged and regulated foreign trade, encouraged merchant involvement in running state enterprsies, developed a metal industry or in Russia, where it constructed the largest state in the world.

Dissolution of central power in the eighteenth century was not due to stagnation but forces of economic expansion unleashed these regimes’ economic innovations unleashed; indigenous networks of commercial capitalism, banking houses etc.

41 Concluding remarks whereby Banaji emphasises the point of the essay: that modes of production are not reducible to exploitation of labour as modes of production consist of broader dynamics than just the production process alone.

Chapter Two: Modes of Production in a Materialist Conception of History

45 - 6 Marxist models of historical and social development have not kept pace with historical research.

52 - 3 Discusses Mauirce Dobb’s definition of feudalism as a mode of production characterised by ’exploitation of the producer by virtue of direct politico-legal compulsion’ or ‘coercive abstraction of surplus labour’ and arguing that modes of production can be derived from given forms of exploitation; this is the source of a lot of problems in Marxist conceptions of history from Banaji’s pov.

In this vulgar framework, wage labour is, for example, regarded as dispossessed labour, separate from the means of production, with labour-power as a commodity, a simple category, i.e. common to all modes of production.

55 If we follow this argument through what characterises a mode of production is the statistical preponderance of a particular form of exploitation.

56 - 7 Lenin writes about how bourgeois productive relations develop in towns or villages and intensity existing backwards forms of exploitation, remaining feudal or semi-feudal in character; Marx writes of the generation of surplus value on cotton plantations of the Amrican south, Luxemburg also writes of capitalist accumulation with forms of slavery and serfdom.

In Volume III Marx refers to the evolution of merchant-capital in antiquity transforming a patriarchal slave system devoted to the production of subsistence to one in which surplus was being generated.

62 - 3 In sum: Marxists have too often assumed commodity production to be easily separable from bondage and feudalism to be incompatible with wage labour.

67 Lenin, Kautsky and Preobrezhensky tended to regard slave plantations as pre-capitalist enterprises.

69 Banaji represents slave plantations as commodity producing enterprises, conducting speculative investments in the production of absolute surplus value on the basis of landed property: capitalist enterprises.

73 - 85 Enormously account of the feudal mode of production - defined as a productive regime in which the lord exerts a complete control over the labour process and small peasant production loses its autonomy and functions in the form of simple reproduction, sustaining surplus-production on the demesne - the upshot of which is feudalism in Europe developed in its purest form when it assumed the form of large-scale commodity-producing enterprises.

92 Feudal enterprises were sustained by many different forms of labour; domestic servants who were legally slaves and undertook the principal tasks such as ploughing, day-labourers housed separately on the estate, part-tine hired workers recruited from the impoverished peasantry, free tenants who performed supplemental services etc; none of these indicate the persistence or emergence of other relations of production whether slavery or capitalist. 93 Quote from Marx which argues that when the lord secures wage labour within this regime it is a function of feudalism and undertaken for the purposes of luxury consumption.

95 Simple commodity production is a subordinate and transitional economic form in which the labour process preserves its patriarchal character, with the predominance of the self-sufficient peasant family labour farm as the basic enterprise of production, where producing househlds preserve their self-sufficiency, transforming only their surplus into commodities but their independence as the basic agents of the productive process.

97 But the relations of production which tie small commodity producers to capital are relations of capitalist production; capital intervenes between the market and small producer with determinate forms of both merchant and industrial capital.

98 - 99 Seeing small-production in these terms allows us to see small producers as concealed wage labourers and not mistake this form of production in third-world contexts as a dual economy, as Arrighi does.

In the colonial period, capitalistically-subjugated simple-commodity production or capitalist production mediated through an internalised simple-commodity producing enterprise accounted for a major share of colonial output when the latter did not derive from commodity-feudal estates or capitalist slave plantations; the economy of large parts of the colonial world - West Africa, Uganda, Mozambique, Bengal, Burma, Cambodia.

As Marx says about India, China and Egypt: colonial peasantry were integrated into commodity production via forced commercialisation: becoming capitalist behind the backs of an existing form of production.

100 - 1 The capitalism that evolved out of the foundations of small commodity production differs from the adequate form of capitalist production in a number of ways; while in industrialising sectors of the world economy labour was dispossessed from all means of subsistence; the peasantry was proletarianised, whereas in colonial settings capital drew into its network a mass of peasant households; this is why peasant struggles in colonial contexts were directed against the monied bourgeoisie rather than the colonial state in which the peasantry might see a potential benefactor.

This is the source of the myth of ‘semi-feudalism’.

Chapter Seven: Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages: What Kind of Transition?

181 Serfdom emerges from a crisis of public authority which characterised the eleventh century; in this sense it was not a feature of the early middle ages.

182 - 4 Account of the confusion among Marxist historians in characterising late antiquity / the early middle ages, such as Hilton, de Croix and Anderson; argues feudalism = the natural economy and dispersion of central authority is not, as Anderson claims, central to feudalism.

The best research apparantly underlines the novelty of the middle ages; extending serfdom and feudalism into antiquity is unsophisticated.

Chapter Eight: Aristocracies, Peasantries and the Framing of the Early Middle Ages

222 - 4 If there is to be a rupture between late antiquity and the early middle ages, it should lie in the formation of the first nobility in Europe under the Merovingians, where a new kind of agrarian expansion first emerges.

231 This is a more historically accurate picture than the notion of a feudal mode of production emerging in line with the expansion of tenancy steadily undermining what Wickham refers to as ’the slave mode of production’.

This implies that Roman landowners gave up direct management when they abandoned the slave mode and denies, ignores, underestimates the persistence of slavery in late antiquity / the early middle ages and also the presence of worker tenants in the early middle ages.

Chapter Ten: Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry: The Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century

277 - 8 Essay directed against the idea that parts of the Indian countryside remain feudal, A. Bhadhuri writing that its basic features are: i) an extensive non-legalised share-cropping system ii) perpetual indebtedness of small tenants iii) rural exploiters operating as landowners and lenders to small tenants iv) tenants having only partial acess to the market, assuming that specific institutional forms of productive relations are integral to the definitions of feudalism or capitalism.

280 What is at issue here is differing stages of the subordination of the small producer to capital; the first formal, the second real; both forms imply capitalist relations of exploitation, the extortion of surplus value.

However formal subsumption implies the technological continuity with a previously existing mode of production.

281 This was for Marx, the general form of every capitalist process of production insofar as it implied the extortion of surplus-labour in the form of surplus-value and the intervention of capital as the immediate owner of the productive process. It is not adequate to captailist production however because the labour process remains external to the movement of capital; it remains technically fragmented or decentralised; real subsumption allows for the extortion of surplus value in relative, as opposed to absolute terms.

282 Banaji’s central argument here and in general: capitalist relations of exploitation can exist outside of a capitalist mode of production.