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WORK TITLE: How the West Came to Rule
WORK NOTES: with Kerem Nisancioglu
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WEBSITE:
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http://polisci.uconn.edu/person/alexander-anievas/ * http://isreview.org/issue/100/uneven-and-combined-development-world-capitalism * https://soundcloud.com/user-802356789-482439204/the-geopolitical-origins-of-capitalism-kerem-nisancioglu-and-alexander-anievas-soas-18112015
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:University of Cambridge, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Political scientist, educator, writer, and editor. University of Connecticut, assistant professor of political science; previously Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, researcher in the Department of Politics and International Studies. Also held fellowships at the University of Oxford and University of Cambridge; organized the Historical Materialism and International Relations Seminar at University of Oxford, 2011.
AWARDS:Sussex International Theory Book Prize, 2015, for Capital, the State, and War; International Political Economy Working Group Book Prize, British International Studies Association, and International Political Sociology Best Book Prize, International Studies Association, 2017, both for How the West Came to Rule.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including International Relations and Philosophy: Interpretive Dialogues, edited by Cerwyn Moore and Chris Ferrands, Routledge, 2010; International Relations: Continuity and Change in Global Politics, Volume 1, edited by William Brown, Olaf Corry, and Agnes Czajka, Open University, 2014; and Cultures of Uneven and Combined Development, edited by James Christie and Nesrin Degirmencioglu, Brill, c. 2016. Contributor to professional journals, including Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Capital & Class, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Historical Materialism, Journal of International Relations, International Politics, International Socialism, International Socialist Review, International Theory, Millennium, Politics, and Review of International Studies Also contributor to online journals and Web sites, including CounterPunch, New Left Project, and Période.
Member of the editorial collective Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory; was managing editor of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs 2008-2010.
SIDELIGHTS
Alexander Anievas is an expert in international relations with a focus on the development of non-Eurocentric approaches to international historical sociology and political economy. His research interests include history and theory of international relations, historical sociology, Marxism and critical theory, international political economy, hegemony and the world order, origins of capitalism, racism and the far right in world politics, the origins of the two world wars, and war and revolution. “I think the first books that really got me into politics were Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America and William Blum’s Killing Hope, which I read some time after graduating high school,” Anievas noted in an interview with CounterPunch Online contributor George Souvlis. Anievas added: “Reading these books opened a door to a history I had previously known nothing about. You know growing up in the United States, you don’t learn about the long and tortured history of US imperialism around the world.”
Marxism and World Politics
A contributor to books and professional journals, Anievas is also an editor and author of books. Anievas is the editor of and a contributor to Marxism and World Politics: Contesting Global Capitalism, which presents a series of essays examining the development in Marxist viewpoints concerning world politics. Contributors come from a wide range of disciplines, including history, philosophy, development studies, geography, and international relations. Topics addressed include imperialism and globalism, connections among social structures and foreign relations, and Marxism and international relations (IR).
“In his editorial introduction, Anievas suggests that a Marxist IR should be characterised by ‘four principles of analysis—historicism, critical realism, methodological holism, theory-praxis nexus,’” wrote Capital & Class contributor Hugo Radice, who went on to note: “The great virtue of this collection is that it reveals, in the convenient form of brief and mostly well-presented essays, the views of a range of major contributors to recent debates.” Marx & Philosophy Review of Books Web site contributor Paul Blackledge wrote: Marxism and World Politics “deserves serious consideration by anyone interested in understanding how the modern world works.”
How the West Came to Rule
In How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism, Anievas and coauthor Kerem Nisancioglu provide an alternative view from the mainstream concerning the development of capitalism. The authors point out that most historical accounts focus on capitalism’s development primarily as a European system that grew out of everything from the French Revolution to the Industrial Revolution in England. According Anievas and Nisancioglu, capitalism’s development should be viewed beyond the borders of Europe and as a global process. Furthermore, they make the case that non-European societies had a decisive role in its development. “While our emphasis on these international sources of capitalism’s emergence may seem rather obvious to some, it’s striking how few theoretical approaches (Marxist or otherwise) actually provide a substantive historical sociological theorization of ‘the international’,” Anievas and Nisancioglu told Viewpoint Web site contributor Benjamin Birnbaum.
The book begins with the authors’ view of the need for a more intricate and complex viewpoint concerning capitalism. Anievas and Nisancioglu go on to offer a defense of Leon Trotsky’s theory of “combined and uneven development” and then to provide an historical account of capitalism’s development, ranging from the Mongol grasslands and the nomadic mode of production to the influence of New World map making and the rise of New World slavery. Another area covered in the book is how partial colonization and industrial development connected with the Indonesian islands contributed to the development of Dutch capitalism. Anievas and Nisancioglu also address how industrial capitalism helped European states in their imperial goals as opposed to countries primarily supported via merchant capitalism.
“One of the most intriguing areas of Marxist scholarship centres around the ‘transition debate’: that is, the controversy surrounding the way capitalist relations developed out of the old world, and the processes by which they achieved ascendency,” wrote Marx & Philosophy Review of Books Web site contributor Tony Mckenna, who went on to note in the same review: How the West Came to Rule “is an exemplary scholarly achievement, providing a powerful riposte to Political Marxism, and an important step forward in a vital debate.” Capital & Class contributor Richard Braude remarked: “Eight hundred years of global history explained! Anievas and Nijancioglu’s book is an ambitious attempt to amalgamate discussions in the fields of international relations, global history, Marxism, world-systems theory and historical sociology.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Capital & Class, October, 2011, Hugo Radice, review of Marxism and World Politics: Contesting Global Capitalism, p. 487; February, 2016, Richard Braude, review of How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism, p. 181.
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, April, 2016, K.M. Zaarour, review of How the West Came to Rule, p. 1235.
ONLINE
CounterPunch Online, http://www.counterpunch.org/ (May 27, 2016), George Souvlis, “How the West Came to Rule: An Interview with Alexander Anievas.”
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford Web site, http://www.polis.cam.ac.uk/ (June 12, 2015), “Dr Alexander Anievas Has Been Awarded the 2015 Sussex International Theory Prize.”
International Socialist Reviews Online, http://isreview.org/ (March 2, 2017), Ashley Smith, “The Uneven and Combined Development of World Capitalism,” review of How the West Came to Rule.
Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/ (January 4, 2011), Paul Blackledge, review of Marxism and World Politics; (October 19, 2015), Tony Mckenna, review of How the West Came to Rule.
University of Connecticut Department of Political Science Web site, http://polisci.uconn.edu/ (March 29, 2017), author faculty profile.
Viewpoint, https://viewpointmag.com/ (December 1, 2015), Benjamin Birnbaum, “Towards a Radical Critique of Eurocentrism: An Interview with Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu.”
LC control no.: n 2009043835
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Personal name heading:
Anievas, Alexander
Found in: Marxism and world politics, 2009: ECIP t.p. (Alexander
Anievas) data view screen (researcher, Dept. of Politics
and International Studies, Univ. of Cambridge; managing
editor, Cambridge review of international affairs)
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Alexander Anievas
Assistant Professor
Political Science
Ph.D., Cambridge
Dr. Alexander Anievas studies international relations, with a particular focus on the development of non-Eurocentric approaches to international historical sociology and political economy. Dr. Anievas has held fellowships at the University of Oxford and University of Cambridge. He is the author of Capital, the State, and War: Class Conflict and Geopolitics in the Thirty Years’ Crisis, 1914-1945 (University of Michigan Press, 2014), for which he was awarded the Sussex International Theory Book Prize, and co-author (with Kerem Nişancıoğlu) of How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (Pluto, 2015). He is currently working on a manuscript (with Richard Saull) entitled Legacies of Fascism: Race and the Far-Right in the Making of the Cold War.
Research Interests: History and Theory of International Relations; Historical Sociology; Marxism and Critical Theory; International Political Economy; Origins of the Two World Wars; Hegemony and World Order; War and Revolution; Origins of Capitalism and the ‘Rise of the West’; Race, Racism and the Far-Right in World Politics.
Editorial and Organizing Work: He is a member of the editorial collective Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory. He was a Managing Editor of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs between 2008 and 2010. In 2011, he organized the ‘Historical Materialism and International Relations’ seminar series held at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford (the podcasts can be found at: http://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/podcast-series/historical-materialism-and-international-relations-series-podcasts.html).
Websites
https://uconn.academia.edu/AlexanderAnievas
Publications
Authored Books
How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (London: Pluto, 2015) co-authored with Kerem Nişancioğlu.
International Political Sociology Best Book Prize of 2017, International Studies Association (ISA), Winner.
International Political Economy Working Group Book Prize of 2016, British International Studies Association, Winner.
Francesco Guicciardini Prize for Best Book in Historical International Relations of 2017, ISA, Honourable Mention.
ISA Theory Best Book Award of 2017, Finalist.
Susan Strange Book Prize of 2016, British International Studies Association (BISA), Finalist.
A symposium on the book can be found at: Progress in Political Economy (September 2016).
Capital, the State, and War: Class Conflict and Geopolitics in the Thirty Years’ Crisis, 1914-1945 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, Configurations: Critical Studies of World Politics Series, 2014).
Winner of the 2015 Sussex International Theory Prize for best book in International Relations.
A symposium on the book can be found at: The Disorder of Things (January 2015).
Edited Books
Historical Sociology and World History: Uneven and Combined Development over the Longue Durée (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, Global Dialogues Series, 2016), co-edited with Kamran Matin.
Cataclysm 1914: The First World and the Making of Modern World Politics (Leiden, NL: Brill Press, Historical Materialism Series, 2015), editor.
Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (London: Routledge, Interventions Series, 2015), co-edited with Nivi Manchanda and Robbie Shilliam.
The Longue Durée of the Far-Right: An International Historical Sociology (London: Routledge, Routledge Studies in Modern History Series, 2015), co-edited with Richard Saull, Neil Davidson, and Adam Fabry.
Marxism and World Politics: Contesting Global Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2010), editor.
Articles
‘How Did the West Usurp the Rest? Origins of the Great Divergence over the Longue Durée’, with Kerem Nişancioğlu, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 59, No. 1 (January, 2017): forthcoming.
‘Confronting Eurocentrism, Reductionism and Reification in International Historical Sociology: A Reply’, International Politics, Vol. 53, No. 5 (October, 2016): forthcoming.
‘History, Theory and Contingency in the Study of International Relations: The Global Transformation Revisited’, International Theory, Vol. 8, No. 3 (November, 2016): 468-480.
‘Revolutions and International Relations: Rediscovering the Classical Bourgeois Revolutions’, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 21, No. 4 (December, 2015): pp. 841-866.
‘International Relations between War and Revolution: Wilsonian Diplomacy and the Making of the Treaty of Versailles’, International Politics, Vol. 51, Vol. 5 (November, 2014): pp. 619-647.
‘The Poverty of Political Marxism’, with Kerem Nişancioğlu, International Socialist Review, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Fall, 2014): pp. 114-133.
‘1914 in World Historical Perspective: The “Uneven” and “Combined” Origins of the First World War’, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 19, No. 4 (December, 2013): pp. 721-746.
‘What’s at Stake in the Transition Debate? Rethinking the Origins of Capitalism and the “Rise of the West”’, with Kerem Nişancioğlu, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 42, No. 1 (September, 2013): pp. 78-102.
‘Back to “Normality”? US Foreign Policy under Obama’, with Adam Fabry and Robert Knox, International Socialism, Series 2, Vol. 136 (Autumn, 2012): pp. 3-28.
‘The International Political Economy of Appeasement: The Social Sources of British Foreign Policy during the 1930s’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Winter, 2011): pp. 601-629.
‘The Uneven and Combined Development of the Meiji Restoration: A Passive Revolutionary Road to Capitalist Modernity’, with Jamie C. Allinson, Capital & Class, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Autumn, 2010): pp. 469-490.
‘The Uses and Misuses of Uneven and Combined Development: An Anatomy of a Concept’, with Jamie C. Allinson, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 22, No. 1 (March, 2009): pp. 47-67.
‘Theories of a Global State: A Critique’, Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Spring, 2008): pp. 190-206.
‘Critical Dialogues: Habermasian Social Theory and International Relations’, Politics, Vol. 25, No. 3 (September, 2005): pp. 135-143.
Book Chapters
‘Troubling Time and Space in World Politics: Reimagining Western Modernity in the Atlantic Mirror’, with Kerem Nişancioğlu, in James Christie and Nesrin Degirmencioglu (eds.), Cultures of Uneven and Combined Development (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2016), forthcoming.
‘Historical Sociology, World History, and the Problematic of “the International”’, with Kamran Matin, in Alexander Anievas and Kamran Matin (eds.), Historical Sociology and World History: Uneven and Combined Development over the Longue Durée (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, Global Dialogues Series, 2016), pp. 1-16.
‘Rethinking Historical Sociology and World History: Beyond the Eurocentric Gaze’, with Kamran Matin, in in Alexander Anievas and Kamran Matin (eds.), Historical Sociology and World History: Uneven and Combined Development over the Longue Durée (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, Global Dialogues Series, 2016), pp. 251-255.
‘The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics’, in Alexander Anievas (ed.) Cataclysm 1914: The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics (Leiden, NL: Brill Press, 2015), pp. 1-20.
‘Marxist Theory and the Origins of the First World War’, in Alexander Anievas (ed.) Cataclysm 1914: The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics (Leiden, NL: Brill Press, 2015), pp. 96-143.
‘Confronting the Global Colour Line: An Introduction’, with Nivi Manchanda and Robbie Shilliam, in Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam (eds.) Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 1-15.
‘The Longue Durée of the Far-Right: An Introduction’, with Richard Saull, Neil Davidson, and Adam Fabry, in Richard Saull, Alexander Anievas, Neil Davidson, and Adam Fabry (eds.) The Longue Durée of the Far-Right: An International Historical Sociology (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 1-20.
‘A World after Its Own Image? The State System, Capitalism and Unevenness’, in William Brown, Olaf Corry, and Agnes Czajka (eds.) International Relations: Continuity and Change in Global Politics, Volume I (Milton Keynes: Open University, 2014), pp. 129-172.
‘The Renaissance of Historical Materialism in International Relations Theory: An Introduction’, in Alexander Anievas (ed.) Marxism and World Politics: Contesting Global Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 1-10.
‘Approaching “the International”: Beyond Political Marxism’, with Jamie C. Allinson, in Alexander Anievas (ed.) Marxism and World Politics: Contesting Global Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 197-214.
‘On Habermas, Marx and the Critical Theory Tradition: Theoretical Mastery or Drift?’, in Cerwyn Moore and Chris Ferrands (eds.) International Relations and Philosophy: Interpretive Dialogues (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 144-156.
Edited Sections and Online Articles
‘Interview with Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancioğlu on How the West Came to Rule’, Base (29 October 2016).
‘The Being and Becoming of Capitalism’, with Kerem Nişancioğlu, Progress in Political Economy blog (October 2016).
‘Provincialising European Capitalism’, with Kerem Nişancioğlu, Progress in Political Economy blog (September 2016).
‘How the West Came to Rule: An Interview with Alexander Anievas’, Counterpunch (May 27, 2016).
‘La théorie marxiste et les origines de la Première Guerre mondiale’, Période (February 2016): French translation of ‘Marxist Theory and the Origins of the First World War’, in Alexander Anievas (ed.), Cataclysm 1914: The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2015), pp. 96-143.
‘Pour une critique radicale de l’eurocentrisme: entretien avec Alexander Anievas et Kerem Nişancioğlu’, with Kerem Nişancioğlu, Période (November 2015).
English version: ‘Towards a Radical Critique of Eurocentrism: An Interview with Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancioğlu’, Viewpoint Magazine (December 2015).
Spanish version: ‘Para una critica radical del eurocentrismo. Entrevista’, Sinpermiso (February 2016).
‘Capitalism: A History of Violence’, with Kerem Nişancioğlu, The Disorder of Things (June 2015).
‘Rethinking the Geopolitics of Capitalist Modernity in the Era of the Two World Wars’, contribution to a symposium on Capital, the State, and War: Class Conflict and Geopolitics in the Thirty Years’ Crisis, 1914-1945, The Disorder of Things (January 2015).
‘Deciphering “the International” in Theory and History: A Reply to The Disorder of Things Forum’, contribution to a symposium on Capital, the State, and War: Class Conflict and Geopolitics in the Thirty Years’ Crisis, 1914-1945, The Disorder of Things (January 2015).
‘Reassessing the Nazi War Economy and the Origins of the Second World War: An Introduction to a Symposium on Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction’, Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, Vol. 22, No. 3/4 (Winter, 2014): pp. 281-297.
‘Confronting the Global Colour Line: Race, Space and Imperial Hierarchy’, with Nivi Manchanda, Special Issue for Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 26, No. 1 (March, 2013).
‘Libya, the Arab Revolution and Western Interventionism: A Case of Opposing Logics’, with Jamie C Allinson, New Left Project, 9 April 2011.
Three-part commissioned series on the ‘Political Economy of Contemporary Hungary’ for The Budapest Times, Vol. 8, Nos. 27-29 (July, 2010). German translation of first two pieces in the Budapester Zeitung, 14 and 19 July 2010.
‘Debating Uneven and Combined Development: Towards a Marxist Theory of “the International”?’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 22, No. 1 (March, 2009), with author introduction.
‘Global Capitalism and the States System: Explaining Geopolitical Conflicts in Contemporary World Politics’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 20, No. 4 (December, 2007), with author introduction.
‘Globalization, Imperialism and US Hegemony’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 19, No. 2 (June, 2006), with author introduction.
May 27, 2016
How the West Came to Rule: an Interview with Alexander Anievas
by George Souvlis
George Souvlis: Would you like to present yourself by focusing on the formative experiences (academic and political) that strongly influenced you?
AA: I think the first books that really got me into politics were Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America and William Blum’s Killing Hope, which I read some time after graduating high school. Reading these books opened a door to a history I had previously known nothing about. You know growing up in the United States, you don’t learn about the long and tortured history of US imperialism around the world; America was supposed to be a force for ‘good’ and stability in the world as you’re taught in school. Obviously reading those books (among many others shortly thereafter) was an eye-opener to say the least. The impetus for my sudden interest in the history of US foreign interventions came after many extended discussions with my Uncle (Ralph Anievas) about US foreign policymaking during the 20th century. He really tuned me into a history that I was oblivious to. I wasn’t a very good student growing up and was more or less political unengaged. But I had some interest in history and he knew a lot about that: he had studied International Relations as a graduate student, taught as adjunct for a while, and is just a very intellectual person all around. So he was a big influence on my early intellectual and political development.
The other central formative moment in my political and intellectual trajectory was the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and my experiences in the anti-war movement. I had come to London for my undergraduate studies right after the 9/11 attacks. At that time, I would have probably described myself as a ‘democratic socialist’ (really a social democrat) with an interest in Frankfurt School Critical Theory which I got introduced to shortly after starting my undergraduate studies. I was against the invasion of Afghanistan, but not that politically involved at the time. However, as the anti-war movement began to develop in the lead up to the Iraq War, I started attending protests, political meetings and the sort. It was really a radicalizing experience, as the people that I would hear speaking out against the war and whom I most agreed with all tended to be Marxists so that sparked an interest in going back and reading the classics: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Bukharin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Lukács, Gramsci, etc. The New Imperialism literature (i.e. Harvey, Gowan, Callinicos, etc.) sparked by the Iraq War was also very influential on my thinking at the time.
At the same time, I was studying Russian and Soviet history and I became fascinated with the Bolshevik Revolution and the causes of its degeneration. Luckily my seminar teacher for one of the courses was a Marxist, Gonzo Pozo-Martin, and he encouraged my interest in the subject and Marxism more generally in a big way. My interest in the sociological consequences of international relations that would become a major focus of my later research also probably originated in studying up on the Bolshevik Revolution and its immediate aftermath. For whatever other reasons contributed to the degeneration of and subsequent Stalinist counter-revolution against the October Revolution, clearly the effects of ‘the international’ and ‘Western’ imperialism in particular were paramount.
GS: Your field of specialization is International Relations. Some years ago you wrote an article about the relation of the field with the title “The renaissance of historical materialism in international relations theory”. Could you historicize this renaissance? Why did this happen?
AA: That was an introduction for a book I edited, Marxism and World Politics (2010). I think the reasons for the renewal of Marxist thinking in International Relations (IR) was in large part a result of some of the developments I noted above: particularly, the so-called return of US imperialism represented by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and, more generally, the apparent shift in US foreign policymaking under the Bush II administration toward more explicitly coercive forms of interventionism. Obviously, US (and ‘Western’) imperialism never went away despite all the hoo-ha about the ‘pacifying’ effects of globalization during the 1990s: it’s useful to remember that the Clinton administration had engaged in more military interventions without declarations of war than any other US President in the 20th century. Nonetheless, the resurgence of more blatant forms of US military interventions as witnessed in Afghanistan, Iraq and the more general ‘War on Terror’ I think definitely played a part in the renewed interest in Marxist-inspired critiques in IR, and the Great Recession of 2007-9 accelerated this trend.
Of course, this trend was not at all uniform. In the US academy, as far as I’m aware, Marxism in IR remains at the critical fringes of the discipline despite the many excellent Marxist scholars working in the field. By contrast, in Canada and the UK, there did seem to be quite a revival in Marxist IR theory. In the UK academy, which I’m most familiar with, this revival was in part also due to the turn toward more historical sociological forms of analysis in British IR during the early 2000s and, relatedly, the cohort of PhD students that came out of the LSE under the influence of Fred Halliday and others. A number of these PhD students went on to write a number of important works in the discipline which, among others, influenced and inspired subsequent Marxist IR scholars like myself.
GS: In one of your articles, (“The Uses and misuses of Uneven and Combined Development”) you reclaim the utilization of the concept of Uneven and combined development -originally used by Trotsky around the turn of the 20th century- as an useful analytical tool in IR analysis. What does this concept mean and how can be useful in the field?
AA: Well, I certainly wasn’t the first to reclaim Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development for IR – the credit for that goes to Justin Rosenberg who first introduced the idea as a theory of international relations in his Isaac Deutscher Prize Lecture of 1994 entitled ‘Isaac Deutscher and the Lost History of International Relations’ (subsequently published in New Left Review, I/215, 1996) and, more systematically, in a 2006 piece ‘Why Is There No International Historical Sociology?’ (European Journal of International Relations, 12/3). The co-authored article (with Jamie Allinson) you mention was very much a response to and dialogue with Rosenberg’s work which has sought to build upon Trotsky’s idea of uneven and combined development in furnishing a genuinely social theory of ‘the international’ (i.e. multiple societies). What does this exactly mean?
Well, the foundational assumption of the classical social theory tradition (from Karl Marx and Ferdinand Tönnies to Émile Durkheim and Max Weber) was that the character of any given society’s development is determined by its internal structures and agents. It was this very conception of the internal history of societies that in fact gave rise to sociology itself (see, among others, Friedrich Tenbruck 1994, ‘Internal History of Society or Universal History’, Theory, Culture, and Society, 11: 75–93). For while the interactions between societies may not be viewed as empirically inconsequential, they are not themselves an object of social theory: that is to say, ‘the international’ essentially remained a contingent factor external to the basic premises of social theory. And this absence of any substantive theoretical conception of ‘the international’ persists to this day, including within Marxism. Whether the particular Marxist approach conceptualizes social systems as operating primarily at the domestic or world level—as exemplified by Political Marxism and World Systems Analysis, respectively—the dilemma remains the same. By working outwards from a conception of a specific social structure (be it feudalism, capitalism, socialism or whatever), the theorization of ‘the international’ takes the form of a reimagining of domestic society writ large: an extrapolation from analytical categories derived from a society conceived in the singular form.
Conversely, in the discipline of International Relations (IR), the theoretical focus is precisely on this international dimension of social existence missed by various social theories. Yet, rather than conceptualizing this international aspect as a distinct but organic dimension of the social world, political realist theories of IR have made the exact opposite mistake from the classical sociology tradition: that is, to abstract ‘the international’ from its social-historical contexts therefore reifying geopolitics into a timeless ‘supra-social’ sphere of great power politics.
So, the idea behind reconstructing Trotsky’s idea of uneven and combined development as a general theory of world history is that it holds the potential to transcend this theoretical divide between ‘social’ and ‘geopolitical’ modes of explanations by reconceptualizing ‘the international’ as an object of social theory. Moreover, it does so in a way that allows for the theoretical and empirical incorporation of the non-Western sources, agents and dynamics driving world history that breaks with Eurocentrism. As demonstrated in my co-authored book (with Kerem Nisancioglu) How the West Came to Rule, these ‘extra-European’ geopolitical conditions and forms of agency were in fact central to the making of the origins of capitalism in Europe and the ‘rise of the West’ over the longue durée.
By positing the differentiated character of development as its ‘most general law’, Trotsky’s concept of uneven development thus provides a necessary corrective to any singular conception of society and its associated unilinear conceptions of history that underpin Eurocentric accounts. By positing the intrinsically interactive character of this multiplicity, combined development in turn challenges the methodological internalism of Eurocentric approaches while the very concept of combination denotes that there has never existed any pure or normative model of development. As such, the theory of uneven and combined development fundamentally destabilizes the methodological internalism and Eurocentrism of the social theory tradition by theoretically registering the interactive and variegated character of development, while rejecting any reified conceptualisation of ‘the universal’ as an a priori property of an internally conceived homogeneous entity (see also, Kamran Matin’s Recasting Iranian Modernity).
GS: Your work- to a certain extent- has built upon the strand of Political Marxism, especially on the work of Robert Brenner. At the same time, it moves beyond it by reconstructing several aspects of it. Could you present us more precisely your criticisms towards the tradition of Political Marxism by focusing on the transition debate and the issue of the rise of the west? Did it happen different from what these scholars have presented?
AA: The framing of your question is interesting as you’re quite correct that my work has been influenced by Political Marxist scholars like Brenner, Teschke, Lacher and others, though it’s also been critical of the Political Marxist tradition broadly speaking. Robert Brenner and Ellen Wood’s work really got me interested in the ‘transition debate’ in the first place, so perhaps it’s kind of natural that they’d be both a central object of critique and influence. I think Brenner’s writings in particular are excellent on a number of levels – particularly his more archival-based and historically focused works like Merchants and Revolution. And in my ‘home’ discipline of IR, some of the most exciting studies coming out over the last couple decades have been from Political Marxists. Charlie Post’s writings on the transition to capitalism in the US have also been quite ground-breaking in my opinion.
So in my co-authored book, How the West Came to Rule, we do draw on a number of key Political Marxist concepts (particularly, Brenner’s ‘rules of reproduction’ and ‘geopolitical accumulation’). And we also build upon certain aspects of Brenner’s historical account of the transition to capitalism, such as his focus on the Netherlands and England as the first two states where capitalist social relations were fully consolidated, and the significance of the particularly homogenous character of the ruling class in the latter’s transition (though we provide a different explanation for this).
But, as noted, we also criticize Political Marxist explanations of the transition, specifically in regards to their impeccably ‘internalist’ account of the rise of the capitalism which focuses almost exclusively on the English countryside. We argue that this kind of methodologically internalist approach is not so much wrong, as it is incomplete. For, as we demonstrate throughout the book, the origins of capitalism in England (as well as in the Low Countries) was fundamentally rooted within and conditioned by various ‘extra-European’ structural factors and forms of agency.
So, to give you a few examples: to understand why both European feudalism was in the grips of a generalized crisis in the 14th century and what factors explain why certain Western European societies were capable of breaking out of this crisis in taking the first steps towards capitalism, you have to look at, as we do in Chapter 3, the wider geopolitical and economic linkages being forged over the Eurasian landmass with the expansion of the Mongol Empire. For the creation of the Pax Mongolica had the effect of plugging European actors into a nascent ‘world system’ of increasingly dense intersocietal relations. And the immediate consequence of European engagements in the Pax Mongolica was an increased exposure to the technical developments and ideas pioneered by the more scientifically advanced Asia. While these contributed to an array of developments in Europe, the Pax Mongolica also proved to be a transmitter not of only social relations and technologies, but also disease. The Black Death, and the subsequent demographic reordering which brought European feudalism into crisis, directly stemmed from this widened sphere of intersocietal interactions.
We then demonstrate in Chapter 4 that the subsequent divergences that occurred within Europe were a product of the ‘super-power’ rivalry between the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. Through sustained military pressure over the Long 16th Century, the Ottomans further undermined existing centres of feudal ruing class power – such as the papacy, the Habsburg Empire, the Italian city-states – while supporting new counter-hegemonic forces, such as the Protestants, French, and the Dutch. The Ottomans also acted as a geopolitical centre of gravity, attracting the Habsburg’s military resources to the Mediterranean and Central East Europe. This in turn provided the structural geopolitical space that proved crucial to the Netherlands and England’s ability to engage in modern state building practices and develop along increasingly capitalist lines – for the former process, think here of the Dutch Revolt.
Specifically in regards to the English situation, the Ottomans unintentionally created for them a condition of geopolitical ‘isolation’, which directly contributed to the unusually unified character of the English ruling class and in turn its success in enclosing and engrossing land. This process of primitive accumulation in the English countryside engendering capitalist property relations that Brenner and Wood so brilliantly examine was therefore directly tied to the geopolitical threat of the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, the Ottoman’s dominance of the Mediterranean and land routes to Asia served to push Northwestern European states onto an altogether novel global sphere of activity – the Atlantic – which had crucial effects on the particular trajectory of both the English and Dutch as they consolidated themselves into distinctly capitalist states.
Indeed, as we examine in Chapter 5, it was the plundering of American resources by European colonialists that further exacerbated an already nascent divergence between the feudalism of the Iberian Empires and the incipient capitalisms of these Northwestern European societies. In particular, we argue that the development of capitalism in England was itself dependent on the widened sphere of economic activity offered by the Atlantic. For it was through the sociological combination of American land, African slave labour and English merchant capital that the limits of English agrarian capitalism were eventually overcome. Not only did the enlarged sphere of circulation provided by the transatlantic triangular trade offer numerous opportunities for British capitalists to expand their scope of activity, but the combination of different labour processes across the Atlantic enabled the recomposition of labour in Britain through the Industrial Revolution.
We can see a similar (though in no way identical process) situation playing out in the Dutch Republic during the 16th and 17th century through their colonies in Southeast Asia. This witnessed the Dutch East India Company overcoming the crisis in the supply of domestic labour-power that threatened to choke-off the Netherlands’ agrarian capitalist development by tapping into the vast well of unfree labour-power in Asia (see Chapter 7). So those are just a few of the ‘extra-European’ historical processes and dynamics left out of Political Marxist accounts that we argue were critical to the origins and development of capitalism in Europe.
GS: In your study Capital, the State, and War you conceptualize the era between the two wars as multidimensional crisis. Would you like to tell us a bit more about this?
AA: What I meant by conceptualizing the era of the two World Wars as a multidimensional crisis was that the fundamental characteristics of the international politics of the period, conceived in its totality, were constituted by three distinct, but intersecting, conflictual axes: (1) a ‘vertical’ axis represented by the class conflicts between labour and capital; (2) a ‘horizontal’ axis capturing the relations of competition and rivalry among ‘many capitals’; and, (3) a ‘lateral’ axis constituted by the geopolitical and military rivalries among the states within the Global North and the various relations of domination and exploitation of the Global North over the Global South. From this perspective, the book aimed to offer a historical sociological re-interpretation of the origins, nature and dynamics of the epoch of the two World Wars in terms of Gramsci’s concept of ‘organic crisis’: that is, the combination of a structural and conjunctural crisis of the hegemony of capitalism simultaneously taking socioeconomic (‘material’) and ideo-political (‘ideational’) forms articulated along national, international, and transnational lines – the latter being experienced during the interwar years in the form of a ‘class war’ waged from both above and below traversing the nation-states making up the international system. As I argued in the book, this ‘early’ Cold War of the interwar period essentially laid the geopolitical and ideological conditions directly leading to the Second World War.
GS: The Marxian anayltical category of “bourgeois revolution” has become trendy again in the light of new studies like that of Neil Davidson. Has this concept something still to offer to historians? Which are its main limitations and in which ways we can push the historical research some steps further?
AA: Yes, I do think the category of ‘bourgeois revolution’ is still an important analytical concept in understanding the emergence and consolidation of capitalist states. And, of course, Neil Davidson’s work has been central to recovering the concept in Marxist theory against the revisionist historiographical onslaught of the last few decades.
As Davidson’s ‘consequentialist’ conceptualization of bourgeois revolutions demonstrates, once you re-orient the analytical focus away from the particular intentions or composition of the agents involved in the making of revolutions to the effects of such revolutions on the rise and consolidation of distinctly capitalist states (conceived as more or less sovereign sites of capital accumulation), then the concept is indeed invaluable. This then shifts the definitional content of the concept from the class that makes the revolution to the effects a revolution has in promoting and/or consolidating a capitalist form of state which will in turn benefit the capitalist class irrespective of any role they may play in such revolution.
The main limitation of Davidson and others consequentalist interpretation of the concept, however, has been their tendency to over-emphasize ‘developmental identity’ over ‘developmental difference’ in examining the very different types of revolutions that have occurred over the modern period. In other words, in the shift to conceptualizing revolutions in terms of their particular socio-political effects, they have fallen into a problematic homogenization of nearly all revolutions in the modern epoch as essentially capitalist as such revolutions came to incorporate elements of capitalism into their social structures. From this perspective, the very different developmental outcomes of revolutions in, say, North Vietnam (1945), China (1949), and Cuba (1959) are all conceived as establishing more or less similar variants of ‘bureaucratic state capitalism’ through ‘deflected permanent revolutions’ – the ‘modern version or functional equivalent’ of bourgeois revolutions, as Davidson has argued. While I think it’s correct to argue that such regimes increasingly assimilated significant features of capitalism over time, to conceive of these revolutions as simply ‘bourgeois’ is, I believe, to stretch the concept beyond breaking point.
GS: Is the USA still the global indisputable hegemon or it is in a process of decline as many commentators suggest? Do you see any other megapower to seriously contest american hegemony? Does it make sense to speak about “american imperalism”? To what extent does it differ from the prior forms of it? Is Obama’s governance an exception regarding this issue in comparison with the previous governments or does it duplicate them?
AA: I think we’ve certainly seen signs of the relative decline of US power over the last two decades. For me, the two water-shed events in this respect was the inability or unwillingness to project US military power abroad during the Russia-George conflict in the summer of 2008 and the Great Recession of 2007-2009 which the US (and world) economy still hasn’t really recovered from. And certainly the inability of state managers to adequately project US military power around the world has alot to do with the longer-term geopolitical and economic consequences of the failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So, yes, US power and hegemony over the past two decades has been in relative decline, though whether this trajectory continues is a much more open question. We may indeed be in a moment of transition from a hegemonic to non-hegemonic geopolitical order. However, unlike some other commentators’ suggestions, I don’t see any other state at the moment (or in the medium-term) accumulating the kind of military, economic and ideological power – all three of which are necessary for the reconstitution of a new hegemon at the international level – that would allow them to fundamentally challenge the US as the dominant world power.
A plausible scenario that could play out is the emergence of a more de-centered geopolitical order, constituted by various regional ‘great powers’ or perhaps even hegemons in different parts of the world. Within such a potential order, the likes of China, India, Russia and possibly Brazil and Iran could play a role, as would the US probably continue to do so, albeit in a more hobbled form, in relation to Europe. But it’s also plausible that a very different scenario could play out which is more akin to what happened after the Vietnam War, where US power fell into a period of relative decline after which it was more or less reconsolidated during the 1980s and 1990s. I think the former scenario of a more de-centered geopolitical order is slightly more likely, though I have serious doubts about whether the likes of China and India can sustain anything approximating the kind of growth rates we’ve seen over the last 20 years or so – indeed, in the case of China, it already looks like it won’t be able to.
On the question of whether it makes sense to speak about US ‘imperialism’, the answer is an emphatic yes. Whether under the guise of ‘humanitarian intervention’ or the global ‘War on Terror’, the default setting of US foreign policymaking is military and economic interventionism around the world. At the most general level, the overriding aim of US foreign policy strategy since around the turn of the 20th century has been to facilitate the ceaseless accumulation of capital buttressed through an ever-expanding “open” world economic system. This is what the famous American historian William Appleman Williams termed the ‘Open Door’. And, contrary to both ‘realist’ critics and ‘liberal’ advocates, this grand strategy of US imperialism has always entailed a sometimes uneasy but potent mix of unilateral and multilateral tactics irrespective of the ideological disposition or party affiliation of any single administration. In short: ‘multilateralism when possible, unilateralism when necessary’.
None of this has changed under the Obama administration. The continuities in US grand strategy under the Obama administration vis-à-vis past administrations far outweigh any differences. While one can point to some minor differences in foreign policy tactics between the three post-Cold War US administration, for example, really it’s the strong continuities in strategic goals that stand out (for a very good recent study on this, see Bastiaan Van Apeldoorn and Naná de Graaff’s American Grand Strategy and Elite Corporate Networks). And even these tactical differences are often exaggerated.
Under the Obama administration, Bush/Cheney’s ‘War on Terror’ has not only continued, but expanded, while the spurious legal arguments made by Obama’s predecessors in legitimizing the ‘War on Terror’ (and, in particular, the war in Iraq) have been adopted wholesale by the current administration and, in certain cases, even further codified into international law. Similarly, Obama has employed a shifting mix of unilateral and multilateral tactics (as witnessed during the Libyan intervention), with the former becoming even more prominent during his second term (for an earlier analysis of some of these developments, see Alexander Anievas, Adam Fabry and Robert Knox 2012, ‘Back to Normality? US Foreign Policy under Obama’). So while Obama may have been successful in momentarily changing the ‘diplomatic mood music’ (as Tariq Ali aptly put it) of the inconvenient truths of unbridled US imperialism uttered by the swaggering cowboys of the Bush administration, he’s done very little, if anything, to change the fundamental character or aims of US foreign policy.
GS: Do you see any glimmer of hope in the candidacy of Bernie Sanders for the revival of the American left?
AA: Yes maybe, but it really depends on what happens to the movement that has coalesced around the Sanders presidency after the primary and general election. I think the real long-term significance of the Sanders campaign for the potential renewal of the US left is not necessarily whether he wins the election – though, clearly, that could also be important in and of itself. But, rather, whether his campaign acts as a further catalyst for and expansion of the kinds of broader-based grassroots organizing from below that has played such an important role in the campaign; and, moreover, that it could do so in a way that is both more self-sustaining than many previous left-wing movements and, even more importantly, moves beyond the politics of the ballot-box. I mean, any sober critical analysis of Sander’s actual policy positions shows that he’s really just an old school New Deal Democrat. Indeed, in the political context of the 1950s and 60s, he would have been considered a moderate Democrat. But, since the reconstruction of Democratic Party inaugurated by the New Clintonian Democrats of 1990s, he’s now viewed as something of a radical, which he – unlike many others on the ‘progressive’ wing of the Democrat Party – more or less embraces by describing himself as a ‘democratic socialist’ (i.e. Scandinavian-style Social Democrat).
So while his policy positions are surely better and more to left than a Hilary Clinton or most other center-right New Democrats, the real hope in his candidacy for revitalizing the American left – and, in particular, small ‘c’ communist or socialist politics – is the possible longer-term effects it could have on both generalizing and consolidating grassroots politics from below that operates within and outside electoral politics while shifting the broader political discourse to the left. I think the Sanders campaign has already more or less achieved the latter effect, though we’ll see whether it can bring about the former. One promising sign that it might, is that Sanders and his campaign has time and again articulated a case for continuing to build a grassroots movement from below with the aim to put pressure on whoever the next President might be. I think is a very important argument, and it does somewhat distinguish Sanders’ campaign from previous ‘left-wing populist’ presidential bids like Howard Dean in 2004 or Dennis Kucinich in 2004 and 2008. But, if Sanders loses the primary election and then turns around and says, ‘hey, it was a great run, but I lost so now everyone go out and campaign for Clinton’ and that’s it, then he’ll likely squander a huge opportunity in rebuilding the US left.
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George Souvlis is a freelance writer.
Towards a Radical Critique of Eurocentrism: An Interview with Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu
Alexander Anievas, Benjamin Birnbaum and Kerem Nisancioclu December 1, 2015
1500s
According to the dominant narrative, the origin of capitalism was a European process at its core: this was a system born in the mills and factories of England, or under the blades of the guillotines during the French Revolution. Political Marxism or even World-Systems analysis have not escaped from this Eurocentric vise. In How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2015), Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu return to and reconceptualize Trotsky’s theory of unequal and combined development in order to assess the decisive role of non-Western societies in capitalism’s emergence. In this sense, they offer an internationalist theory of social change that is also not solely focused on the role of industrial labor.
Benjamin Birnbaum: Your recently published book How the West Came to Rule, starts with a critical assessment of the Marxist-inspired theorizations regarding the transition to capitalism such as World-Systems Theory or Political Marxism. Why are they insufficient to account for how the West came to rule?
Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu: Well, there are actually two distinct, albeit tightly interconnected, issues here. The first regards World-System Analysis and Political Marxist conceptions of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and the second involves explaining the ascendancy of Western domination. In the opening chapter of How the West Came to Rule, we really only focus on the first question concerning the transition to capitalism vis-a-vis Political Marxism and Immanuel Wallerstein’s particular rendition of World-System Analysis, while in later chapters we connect this issue to the “rise of the West” debate. We proceeded in such a way because for both Political Marxists and the particular form of World-System Analysis put forward by Wallerstein, these two historical questions are largely conflated: the origins of capitalism in certain Western European states (notably, Holland and England) explains how “the West” rose to a position of global dominance.
This kind of approach is not so much wrong, as it is incomplete. Clearly once the initial breakthroughs to capitalism were made in the Netherlands and England, this led to increasing material disparities between these societies and others. At the same time, however, the advent of capitalism in Northwestern Europe did not immediately translate into the kind of hierarchical power relation that characterized the nineteenth century international order. While capitalist social structures offered the productive potential for increased technological innovations (particularly within the military sphere) and superior financial and organizational capacities, the developmental effects were not instant or undifferentiated, but staggered and uneven. Indeed, had it not been for the European “discovery” of the New World and the significant material benefits accrued to Europe – the benefits of which were disproportionately distributed to the Netherlands and England – this potential may have gone largely unrealized (cf. Chapter 5). Much the same can be said for the effects that the colonies in the East Indies had on Dutch capitalist development: were it not for the Dutch ruling class’ abilities to draw on this vast – albeit dispersed – mass of labor-power in Asia, its capitalist development would have been unsustainable in the way other “antediluvian” forms of capital1 were like the Northern Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice (cf Chapter 7).
For these reasons, an account of the origins of capitalism in Northwestern Europe is in itself not enough to explain the subsequent ascendancy of Western power. Rather, capitalism should be conceived as having provided the conditions of possibility for Northwestern European states to eventually overcome and dominate their Asian rivals. Nonetheless, it was only once capitalist Britain transformed itself into an industrial-capitalist power that it was capable of dominating other highly developed Asian societies such as China. Moreover, Britain’s industrialization was greatly facilitated by both the New World “discoveries” and, perhaps even more importantly, the colonization of the Indian landmass which was only made possible through a confluence of internal and external pressures that severely destabilized the Mughal Empire by the early eighteenth century (see Chapter 8).
So the reduction of the question of “how the West came to rule” to an explanation of the transition to capitalism is, as we see it, a general problem common to both Political Marxists and World-System Analysts such as Wallerstein and those who closely follow him. At the same time, there are number of more specific problems with their respective theorizations of the origins of capitalism (cf. Chapter 1). Briefly stated, we highlight three particularly problematic and interconnected issues with Political Marxist explanations of capitalism’s emergence: firstly, their commitment to a methodologically internalist and Eurocentric – or, more precisely, for Brenner’s followers, Anglocentric – analysis of the origins of capitalism; secondly, the resulting deficiencies in their examination of the relationship between the making of capitalism and geopolitics; and, thirdly, their highly abstract and minimalist conception of capitalism. For these reasons, we argue that Political Marxist approaches to the study of capitalism are both theoretically and historically untenable, despite the many invaluable insights and concepts they have to offer. Similarly, while highlighting some of the important contributions that Wallerstein and other World-System scholars have made to the study of capitalism’s origins, we nonetheless argue that this approach – especially Wallerstein’s rendition of it – remains limited by two debilitating problems: the unwitting reproduction of a certain kind of Eurocentrism that erases non-European agency; and the inability to provide a sufficiently historicized conception of capitalism.
These problems with Political Marxism and World-System Analysis turn out to be quite big when examining the history of capitalism. Without a strong understanding of the broader intersocietal or geopolitical contexts in which European societies (notably within the Northwest) first made the transition to capitalism, you simply cannot explain how capitalism first emerged. The making of capitalism in Europe was not simply an intra-European phenomenon, but a decidedly international or intersocietal one, which saw non-European agency relentlessly impinging upon and (re)directing the trajectory and nature of European development. Tracing this international, often extra-European dimension in the origins of capitalism and the so-called “rise of the West” is one of the key themes of the book.
While our emphasis on these international sources of capitalism’s emergence may seem rather obvious to some, it’s striking how few theoretical approaches (Marxist or otherwise) actually provide a substantive historical sociological theorization of “the international.” Whether the approach in question conceptualizes the primary “unit of analysis” as operating at the domestic or world level – as exemplified by Political Marxism and World-System Analysis, respectively – the problem remains the same. By working outwards from a conception of a specific social structure (be it slavery, feudalism, capitalism, etc.), the theorization of “the international” takes the form of a reimagining of domestic society writ large: an extrapolation from analytical categories derived from a society conceived as a unitary abstraction. This then vanishes what is unique to any intersocietal system: a superordinating “anarchical” structure irreducible to the historically variegated forms of societies constituting any given system.
This is a particularly debilitating problem for Marxism because one of the hallmarks of Marxist theory is a strong claim to be able to provide a genuinely holistic conception of social structures, which requires a theoretical internalization of the interdependency of each element within it “so that the conditions of its existence are taken to be part of what it is.”2 If such a claim is to be taken seriously, then the theoretical standing of “the international” for a historical materialist approach to the origins of capitalism requires a direct engagement with the question of what is “the international” understood and theorized in its own substantive historical and sociological terms. In other words, how can one offer a properly “sociological definition” of “the international” – meaning “that dimension of social reality which arises specifically from the coexistence within it of more than one society” – which “formulates this dimension as an object of social theory…organically contained, that is, within a conception of social development itself?”3
Our theoretical answer to this problematic – and the Eurocentric modes of analyses it often gives rise to – is a critical reconstruction of Leon Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development (UCD) which has seen a recent revival in the discipline of International Relations thanks in large part to Justin Rosenberg’s work.4 By positing the multilinear character of development as its “most general law,” uneven development provides a necessary corrective to the ontological singular conception of societies and the attendant unilinear conception of history that underpins Eurocentric analyses. By positing the inherently interactive character of social-political multiplicity, combined development in turn challenges the methodological internalism of Eurocentric approaches whilst further subverting its strong stagist model of development.
BB: Political Marxists offer a sharp distinction between feudal extra economic forms of surplus extraction and capitalist non-coercive forms of surplus extractions. Thus, they get close to an ideal-type abstraction. Yet, Marx doesn’t seem to use such a sharp distinction as he considered – for example – slavery in the Americas as at least partially capitalist because it is part of a wider set of international capitalist economic relations. How do you determine capitalism?
AA and KN: We’re in absolute agreement with your assessment of Political Marxism’s conception of capitalism; it is far too abstract and Platonic to be very useful in understanding capitalism (past or present) as it excludes or externalizes so many sociohistorical processes that were – and continue to be – integral to the development and reproduction of capitalism. This has some important political implications. The externalization of “extra-economic” forms of exploitation and oppression from capitalism ultimately leads Political Marxists to exclude the histories of colonialism and slavery, an example you correctly point out, from the inner workings of capitalism, arguing instead that such practices were rooted in the feudal or absolutist logic of geopolitical accumulation. While we would not go as far as to claim that Political Marxists ignore colonialism and slavery per se – for example, Charlie Post has a number of excellent works5 on these issues, even if we disagree with his theoretical conclusions – they do nonetheless view these histories as sitting outside the pure “logic” of capitalist development.
By contrast, in How the West Came to Rule, we examine these histories as integral or constitutive aspects of the formation of capitalism as the globally dominant mode of production (see esp. Chapters 5, 7 and 8). We also look at the intertwined and variegated formation of racial, gender and sexual hierarchies intricately bound up and constitutive of the making of capitalism. With these issues in mind, we argue in the book that capitalism is best understood as a set of configurations, assemblages, or bundles of social relations and processes oriented around the systematic (re)production of the capital–wage-labor relation, but not reducible – either historically or logically – to that relation alone. By placing an emphasis on such configurations and assemblages, we aim to highlight how the accumulation and reproduction of capital through the exploitation of wage-labor presupposes a wider array of different social relations that make these processes possible. These social relations may take numerous forms, such as coercive state apparatuses, ideologies and cultures of consent, or forms of power and exploitation that aren’t immediately given in or derivative of the simple capital-wage-labor relation, such as racism, patriarchy and unwaged labor. To be a bit more concrete, the example you give of slavery in the Americas – and, similarly, the forms of slavery in the Dutch colonies in East Asia – is exactly the kind of configuration which was geared toward the systematic reproduction of the capital–wage-labor relation within England, but is nonetheless not reducible to that relation itself (see Chapters 5 and 7).
BB: On the one hand, Chakrabarty states that History 1s are “constitutively but unevenly modified” by History 2s, on the other hand according to Chibber “Chakrabarty overestimates the power of History 2 to destabilize History 1, he vastly underestimates the sources of instability within History 1.” How does the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD) contribute to understand the processes of differentiation within the universalizing dynamics of capitalism?6
AA and KN: There is a lot of confusion over Chakrabarty’s distinction between History 1 and History 2. Some quick definitions then:
History 1 denotes a past presupposed by capital, “a past posited by capital itself as its precondition” and “its invariable result.”7 Although Chakrabarty leaves this largely unspecified, it is clear that what he has in mind is abstract labor.
History 2 denotes those histories that are encountered by capital “not as antecedents” established by itself, nor “as forms of its own life-process.”8 History 2s are not “outside” of capital or History 1. Instead, they exist “in proximate relationship to it,”9 whilst “interrupt[ing] and punctuat[ing] the run of capital’s own logic.”10 History 2s may well include non-capitalist, pre-capitalist or local social relations and processes, but the concept is not exhausted by these, and can refer to universal and global categories, social relations and process, including commodities and money – two universal categories central to the reproduction of capitalism.11
Now, on the one hand, we would argue that Chakrabarty doesn’t underestimate the sources of instability within History 1. In Provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty devotes an entire subsection titled “Abstract Labor as Critique” where he analyses precisely those sources of instability within History 1 (what is commonly known among Marxists as the “moving contradiction”). On the other hand, Chakrabarty in no way overstates the significance of History 2. That is, the mistake lies with Chibber’s interpretation; by reducing History 2 to “local culture,”12 it is clear that Chibber doesn’t understand what History 2 actually means. This becomes especially evident when Chibber invokes the “universal struggle by subaltern classes to defend their basic humanity” and “the interest in well-being” as a “fundamental source of instability to capital.”13 From the above definitions, we can see that when Chibber invokes “well-being” and “basic humanity,” he is paradoxically invoking History 2s as the “source of instability to capital.” If anything Chibber is guiltier of the problem he attaches to Chakrabarty than Chakrabarty himself.
The quagmire of muddle fashioned by Chibber shouldn’t hinder us from reading Chakrabarty sympathetically, or indeed reading him as a Marxist. Like Marx, Chakrabarty emphasizes the tendency for capital to universalize and differentiate in equal measure. But where Chakrabarty goes beyond Marx is identifying universalising and differentiating tendencies outside of but related to the pristine logic of capital (though he’s not alone in doing this). This brings into our understanding of global capitalism forms of oppression but also agency and resistance that can reside outside of the wage-relation. This opens the theoretical, historical and political space to acknowledge the ways in which reproductive and/or affective labor, or anti-racist, anti-caste struggles are integral to anti-capitalist politics. It brings into view indigenous struggles over land or the earth as vital components of global resistance.
However, there is an additional source or field of universalization-differentiation that Chakrabarty doesn’t discuss – the intersocietal or international. One of the key insights of UCD is to demonstrate how the existence of multiple societies – multiple states – under capitalism is at once an indication of its universalising tendency and its tendency towards differentiation and fragmentation. That is, the nation-state functions as a universal standard of what form a political community can and should take. At the same time, concrete processes of uneven and combined development constitute one of the biggest sources of continuing differentiation between nation-states.
A central factor perpetuating this uneven development, manifested in territorialized and geographical forms, is the construction of spatially-embedded physical infrastructures (e.g. transport facilities and communication technologies) necessary for the expanded reproduction of capital. Investments in such built environments come to define regional spaces for the circulation of capital. Capital thus demonstrates a clear tendency towards concentrating in specific regions at the expense of others, producing a somewhat porous but nevertheless identifiable “territorial logic of power” – regionality – inherently arising out of the processes of capital accumulation in time and space.14
This form of uneven development is unique to the capitalist system. The effect of these tendencies is that they will perpetually act to undermine any unification of “many capitals” into a single fraction of “global capital.” As Marx said, “Capital exists and can only exist as many capitals and its self-determination therefore appears as the mutual interaction of these upon one another.” It must then by necessity “repel itself from itself.” Consequently, a “universal capital, one without alien capitals confronting it, with which it exchanges – is therefore a non-thing.”15
Moreover, as David Harvey has shown, the reproduction and spatial expansion of capital accumulation produces and necessitates the creation of relatively immobile and concentrated organized territorial configurations. Dense spatial constellations of capitalist social relations can thereby provide the territorial foundations of states by both commanding and supplying the necessary resources to sustain a functioning state apparatus. In this sense, the uneven and combined character of capitalist development reinforces and perpetuates territorial fragmentation which, in its contemporary modality, takes the form of a plurality of sovereign nation-states. In our view, this territorializing and deterritorializing geopolitics of capitalism is unaccounted for in Chakrabarty; a geopolitics that we think is crucial to understanding the origins of capitalism and its continued contemporaneous reproduction.
BB: You underline a weakness shared by both Eurocentric and postcolonial accounts:the presupposition of a “hermetically sealed European history in which modernity was created before being subsequently expanded globally.”16 What are the main ideas of the “internationalist historiography” of capitalism which is supposed to abolish that weakness?
AA and KN: What we mean by an “internationalist historiography”17 is this: that the origins and history of capitalism can only be properly understood in “international” or intersocietal terms, and that this very “internationality” is constitutive of capitalism as a historical mode of production. Although this may seem intuitively obvious to many readers, in the book we demonstrate how existing conceptions of capitalism have hitherto failed to take this “internationality” seriously, leading to problematic theorizations of its origins and development that limit not only our histories of capitalism, but also our critiques of the present.
While there have been many studies that empirically point to this “international” dimension of capitalism’s historical emergence and development, they by and large fail to theoretically incorporate the specificities of “the international” as an organic component of social development (see above). In other words, the international or geopolitical sources of development are relegated to the sphere of contingencies, exogenous “shocks” and/or other untheorized externalities attached in an ad-hoc way to a pre-formed theory of society conceived as a singular abstraction. In overcoming the theoretical and empirical weaknesses of such approaches, the book offers a theoretical reconstruction of Trotsky’s idea of UCD which uniquely incorporates a distinctly intersocietal dimension of causality into its basic conception of development. For implicit in Trotsky’s original formulation was a fundamental redefinition of the concept and logic of development itself: one inscribed with a “more-than-one” ontological premise that is missing in other social theoretical approaches.18
Such a perspective not only widens the spatial scope of analysis to capture the distinct determinations arising from the coexistence and interaction of multiple societies (i.e. “the international”), but also allows for a resolute focus on the variegated relations of interconnection and co-constitution between “the West” and “the Rest” in their joint, if uneven, making of the modern capitalist world. From the economically regenerative effects of the expansion of the Pax Mongolica over the Long Thirteenth Century to the Ottoman-Habsburg “super-power” rivalry during the Long Sixteenth century to the “discovery” of the New World and its’ division along linearly-demarcated spaces of sovereignty to the broader economic and strategic benefits accrued from the colonies spanning the Atlantic to Indian Ocean, all these historical processes and developments were absolutely central to collapse of feudalism and the emergence of capitalist modernity (cf. Chapters 3-8).
BB: Marx wrote that “the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.“19 How did the new world “discoveries” contribute to the development of capitalism and the modern territorialized state system?
AA and KN: Indeed, the 1492 “discoveries” were crucial to the formation of modern capitalist European societies, constituting a fundamental vector of uneven and combined development through which the modern world order was born. In How the West Came to Rule, we examine a vast array of different processes and developments in which the “New World” impacted the differential developmental trajectories of the “Old World” in their variegated transitions (and non-transitions) to capitalist modernity.
For example, we look at how the intersocietal interactions, conflicts and struggles between Europeans and Amerindians that took place in the Americas were critical to the emergence of modern conceptions of territorial sovereignty and the development of Eurocentrism, scientific racism and the modern institution of patriarchy. We examine in particular how the Spanish jurists of the sixteenth century sought to reconcile the increasing gap between Christendom as an all-encompassing universal ideology and the encounter with non-Christian peoples in the Americas. The jurists’ response to these problems invited a reconceptualization of universality, based on an ontological distinction between Europeans and “Indians.”
Thus, whilst colonialists were conducting the “greatest genocide in human history”20 in the Americas, these ideologues in Europe were busying themselves with tearing down an authority – Christendom – that was proving incapable of articulating New World experiences. It was out of the resultant debris that the twin conceptions of the European Self and the non-European Other would emerge, paving the way for an ideological apparatus – Eurocentrism, racism, patriarchy – that would serve to both legitimize the horrors of colonialism and spur the development of capitalism. The colonial encounter in the Americas also witnessed (for the first time in history) the development of linear forms of sovereignty territoriality (cf. Chapter 5).
We further show how the plunder of American precious metals and resources by Europeans further exacerbated an already nascent divergence between the feudalism of the Iberian empires and the incipient capitalisms of Northwest Europeans. Indeed, the development of capitalism in England was itself dependent on the widened sphere of activity offered by the Atlantic. As we demonstrate, it was only through the sociological combination of American land, African slave labor, and English capital that the limits of English agrarian capitalism were eventually overcome. Not only did the widened sphere of circulation implied by the highly lucrative transatlantic triangular trade offer numerous opportunities to English capitalists to expand their sphere of activity, but the combination of different labor processes across the Atlantic enabled the recomposition of labor in Britain through the Industrial Revolution. The brutal exploitation of slaves on the plantation offered an array of “inputs” that contributed to the Industrial Revolution. It was in this respect, among others, that the real subsumption of labor under capital in the British factory, and the establishment of “free” wage labor in Europe, “needed” as its fundamental precondition “the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.”
BB: Neo-Weberian scholars consider geopolitical competition as the driving force behind state formation in Europe. Thereby, in a realist manner, they suppose that international politics take place within a context of anarchy. If anarchy is not the driving force behind politics what explains the war-prone nature of the European feudal state system?
AA and KN: In short, the answer lies in the specificities of feudal relations of production which, over the course of the late Medieval and early modern periods, descended into a generalized systemic crisis. At first sight, this might seem like an illicit return to the kind of internalist Eurocentric theorizing we criticize throughout the book. However, when widening the analysis beyond Europe, it is important to recognize that Europe’s feudal social relations – and the geopolitical system emerging therewith – along with their technological, military, and ideological components all bore a distinctly intersocietal origin as we show in the book (cf. Chapters 3, 4, 6, 8)
While keeping these intersocietal, extra-European sources of the making of European feudalism in mind, how then did feudalism generate such a competitive and war-prone geopolitical system? Here we partially follow Robert Brenner’s work on the subject. In the absence of the kind of unprecedented economic dynamism afforded by capitalist social relations, war was an expedient mode of expanding the surpluses available to the ruling classes under feudalism. Feudal productive relations offered few incentives for either peasant or lord to continuously and systematically introduce more productive technological methods, particularly as peasants had direct access to their means of production and subsistence. Consequently, lordly interests lay in extracting more surpluses by directly coercive means. This could be done by pushing the peasants to the limit of their subsistence or by seizing the demesnes of other lords. The latter course resulted in a process of “political accumulation” amongst the lords themselves – a war-driven process of state formation.21
This condition meant that the aristocratic ruling class required the political, ideological, and military means in order to exploit the peasantry and extract a surplus for the purpose of lordly consumption. However, unlike the tributary empires in Asia, these means were not controlled by – or concentrated in – a centralized and unified state, but instead dispersed across the nobility. This dispersion of coercive capabilities meant that political authority in Europe was fragmented, parcellized and therefore also highly competitive, with heightened intra-lordly struggle taking place over territories both within and outside of feudal “states” (see Chapters 4, 6,and 8).
The lords left standing at the end of the process of geopolitical accumulation formed the basis for the absolutist state. Representing a “redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination,”22 the absolutist states system of early modern European remained driven by the systemic imperatives of geopolitical accumulation that came to interact – and in some cases fuse – with the emerging logic of competitive capital accumulation accompanying those states already making the transition to capitalism in part explaining the endemic state of war-marking the epoch. What made this era of permanent war so intense was the generalized crisis of feudal production relations besetting Europe.
The persistence of armed conflict throughout the period was not just a result of the usual structural dynamics of the feudal mode – the tendency toward (geo)political accumulation – but, rather, because the process of ruling class reproduction was itself in crisis and under threat as feudalism had virtually exhausted all possibilities for further internal expansion (i.e. within Europe). This in turn precipitated a sharp fall in seigniorial revenues, itself further exacerbated by the plague-induced demographic crisis, leading to a dramatic rise in peasant revolts and class struggles more generally (see Chapter 3). This perilous situation was further exacerbated and “overdetermined” by the persistent geopolitical threat emanating from the Ottoman Empire (see Chapter 4). Under such conditions, a near continuous state of war – including both intra-ruling class struggles and the incessant efforts to crush peasant rebellions – became a sociological “necessity” (cf. Chapter 6).
BB: Against Political Marxist accounts insisting on the internal reasons for the development of capitalism in England you underline the decisive role of external factors via “the privilege of backwardness” or “the whip of external necessity.” What external factors contributed to the development of capitalism in England and how are the linked to internal factors such as the class struggle between lords and peasants leading to agrarian capitalism?
AA and KN: Political Marxists have correctly identified the existence of a relatively homogenous English ruling class as an explanation for England’s peculiar trajectory to agrarian capitalism. In contrast to the French, where the state and the nobility competed over peasant surpluses, the English ruling class acted in unison to expropriate the peasantry and enclose land. By “freeing” the peasantry from land in this way, and by concentrating the means of production in the hands of the ruling class, we see the emergence of a distinct class of capitalists, on the one hand, and wage-laborers, on the other. But why did England specifically exhibit this peculiar ruling class unity? For Perry Anderson, among others, the answer lies in the relative demilitarization of the English ruling class during the sixteenth century. Whereas early modern absolutist states in the rest of Europe were centralizing and expanding their military capacities in the form of standing armies and investment in arms, England was regressing militarily.
The obvious explanation for this demilitarization is England’s relative isolation from geopolitical pressures – they didn’t need an army because they were comparatively insulated from the multiple wars engulfing Europe at the time. We argue one of the key reasons – arguably the single most important reason – for England’s isolation was that it was unimportant to the ambitions and concerns of the major geopolitical powers of the time – it was considered “relatively backward,” a north eastern backwater that was irrelevant to the reproduction of Christendom and imperial feudalism. In the sixteenth century, the single most important threat to the great powers of Christendom was found to the southeast, in the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottomans were making rapid incursions into south east Europe and taking possession of the eastern Mediterranean – at this time the pivot of European geopolitical interests. The Ottomans thus acted as a kind of buffer, or geopolitical center of gravity, that sucked the most powerful state in Europe into its orbit, leaving England relatively isolated from the machinations of the Habsburgs, the Papal states, Italian city states and (to a lesser degree) the French. And it was the isolation wrought by the Ottoman buffer that homogenized the English ruling class, enabling it to undertake such unified action against the peasantry. The history of the enclosures therefore can only be fully understood when viewed from an Ottoman vantage point.
BB: According to André Tosel, 1991 was not the end of Marxism but the end of Marxism-Leninism which also contained a deterministic, stagist perspective of historical development. How do you explain the re-emergence of UCD in Marxist theory?
AA and KN: Trots might cry: “Re-emergence? Pah! We always spoke about UCD!” However, it is interesting that despite Trotskyists’ invoking UCD, it is only in the last decade or so that there has been such a resolute and innovative use of the idea, either theoretically or historically. Perhaps, more interestingly, many of these innovations are coming from people who long abandoned Trotskyism as a political project (or who were never part of it in the first place). This, incidentally, is why we would resist John Hobson’s characterization of UCD as “neo-Trotskyist.”23
But the question of UCD’s very own historicity is extremely important and one we only partially broach in the book. Though we do recognize the context of its emergence in debates among revolutionaries in the early 20th century, we don’t really examine its recent re-emergence. And although we historically situate the study of capitalism in the post-2008 context, the history of UCD as an intellectual project has a different pulse. From a rather insular, academic perspective, the currency of the idea of UCD is rooted in a set of intellectual problems that Marxists (and subsequently non-Marxists) were grappling within the discipline of International Relations – specifically, “why is there no international historical sociology?” or, more generally, why has been so difficult to bridge between sociological and geopolitical modes of theorizing.24 UCD struck many of us as a remarkably useful way of answering these questions. But there is a wider historical and political context that is worth explicating.
For starters, yes, 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union put paid to any remnants of stadial theorizing (within Marxism at least). But it also opened up a set of political questions that tore at many of the old (and problematic) certainties of the Marxist(-Leninist) left. We see in this period the triumph of neoliberalism, the changing nature of the state-form, the growing vagaries of so-called globalization and the increasing subsumption of social life under the auspices of capital accumulation. All of these developments opened very new political possibilities and necessities that the “old left” – with its attachment to the identity of “the worker” – could not adequately engage with. Reflecting on this political and intellectual history then, it is not surprising that UCD emerges in a context in which theoretical constructs derived from singular experiences of oppression – derived from singular vantage points – were becoming increasingly irrelevant if not downright useless to the lived experiences of the global proletariat.
Concurrently, the increasing currency of poststructuralist, postcolonial, critical race, feminist and queer conceptions of the way in which capitalism – and power more generally – operates placed a greater conceptual need to engage with questions of liminality, hybridity, intersectionality and so on. Many of the more dogmatic trends of Marxism tended to ignore, sideline or be openly hostile to these different approaches, and many continue to do so (think of the various lazy dismissals of “identity politics” that continue to pervade various political organizations that lay claim to liberation and revolution). UCD is an idea that is – theoretically at least – more sympathetic to and more in common with these “post-positivist” trends (or rather that’s the way we see it). At the same time, it is an idea that remains wedded in many (not necessarily all) respects to a historical materialist approach, class analysis and Marx(ist) writings. To our minds, UCD therefore might constitute a framework through which theoretical and political gaps between Marxist and non-Marxist critical approaches might be productively bridged. For example, in How the West Came to Rule, we seek to open a dialogue with postcolonial approaches, rather than dismiss them.
BB: Michael Löwy states that “the politics of combined and uneven development” consists of three dialectically linked problems: the possibility of proletarian revolution in “backward” countries; the uninterrupted transition from the democratic to socialist revolution; and the international extension of the revolutionary process.25 What role does the uninterrupted international revolutionary process play in your analysis, where UCD is considered to be transhistorical, or – to be precise – transmodal?
AA and KN: Perhaps it’s worth clarifying what we mean by UCD operating transmodally. When used at a general, transmodal level, UCD is best understood as a basic premise or ontology of human history. Put differently it identifies an abstract set of determinants which describe a general condition confronted by all societies irrespective of historical context. Therefore, when used at this transmodal level, UCD doesn’t actually tell us much about concrete historical processes and certainly explains very little about these processes. At this level of abstraction it does not constitute theory. However, this is not the only way in which UCD can be used. In the book, we also use it methodologically. From the transmodal ontological premise we can derive a set of questions for research, in particular an attentiveness to: (1) the multiplicity of societal development; (2) interactions between societies arising out of that multiplicity; and, (3) the combined forms of development that emerge out of these interactions. But, these general ontological and methodological assumptions taken on their own, still do not constitute a theory as such – at least not in the specifically Marxist sense. That is, theory is only possible at the more historically specific-level at which the ontological and methodological coordinates of study are connected to more determinate, concrete, historical-sociological categories. We think this is useful in that we can consider UCD in its historical specificity, as something that is different in different historical contexts, without necessarily abandoning the transmodal premise. (This is in fact precisely how the Marxist idea of “mode of production” works).
Returning to Löwy, his excavation of the politics of UCD takes place at a concrete level of analysis, one which is inflected by the transmodal conception of UCD, but not derived from it. The problems Löwy therefore identifies are specific to a set of historical problems (in particular those pertaining to the 20th century) that do not necessarily hold in different contexts, be it today or the early modern period (which is the focus of our analysis). Whether these problems are constituted in different epochs is the work of historical sociology and political activity, and cannot be derived from any transmodal claims alone.
Were Löwy’s problems present or observable in the focus of our analysis (i.e. the origins to capitalism)? Well, some of his claims – specifically the existence of a proletariat and the question of transition from democratic to socialist revolution – presuppose capitalism, and therefore cannot be considered as part of the history of its origins. The way the third problem – the international extension of the revolutionary process – is framed is itself problematic. It presupposes some internal – domestic – revolution that subsequently extends outwards – internationally. Such a perspectives suffers from the sort of internalism (or methodological nationalism) that UCD is used to overcome.
Nonetheless, in some formal sense, you could argue that there are numerous ways in which “international revolutionary processes” played some significant role in the period we look at the in the book. Take for example, the crisis of Christendom. We have in Europe the breakdown of feudalism and peasant uprisings, articulated along the lines of religious revolt. At the same time, peasant revolts against Christendom facilitated the expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Christian territories, further weakening the Papacy and the Habsburg Empire. We have simultaneously in the Americas a series of revolts by indigenous communities against Iberian imperialism. Meanwhile, in Asia, local communities were resisting attempts at colonial settlement by the Iberians and, later, Dutch powers.
We argue that these international, often non-European, uneven yet intersecting histories were crucial to breakdown of social order in Europe. It was subsequently out of the wreckage of this crumbling social order that alternative methods of exploitation and social order emerged – namely capitalism, racism and modern forms of patriarchy. Moreover, such new methods were used specifically to crush and/or control these international insurgent movements. I guess the point here is a more basic one – the ontological premise of a transmodal UCD and the methodological pointers it gives rise to helps us understand class struggle and subaltern agency in intersocietal rather than domestic or methodologically nationalist terms. UCD helps us recognize how uneven, multiple, insurrectionary processes might intersect and combine globally. And this is of relevance today, just as much as it was when Löwy was writing.
This interview was originally published in Période.
Dr Alexander Anievas has been awarded the 2015 Sussex International Theory Prize
Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS)
Welcome to POLIS
last modified Jun 12, 2015 12:27 PM
Dr Alexander Anievas, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in POLIS, has been awarded the 2015 Sussex International Theory Prize, for his monograph "Capital, the State and War: Class Conflict and Geopolitics in the Thirty Years' Crisis, 1914-1945". The prize, awarded by the Centre for Advanced International Theory at the University of Sussex, is for the best book in international theory published during the previous year. Dr. Anievas will deliver the Sussex International Theory Prize Lecture in the spring of 2016.
Dr. Anievas joins the department after serving as a Levrhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. His research interests in international political economy, postcolonial studies and the origin and development of capitalism gave rise to his first two books: Capital, the State and War (University of Michigan Press, 2014) and How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2015). The former work garnered him the 2015 Sussex International Theory Prize.
Dr. Anievas will be teaching classes in IR Theory, Globalization and International Political Economy on the Storrs campus.
Alexander Anievas
(BA (Hons), MPhil, PhD)
Post:
Anna Biegun Warburg Junior Research Fellow, St. Annes College
Email:
alexander.anievas@st-annes.ox.ac.uk
College:
St Anne's College
Research: His research primarily concerns the political economy and historical sociology of international relations with a particular emphasis on their relationship to foreign policymaking, interstate rivalry and war. His PhD dissertation (Capital, States, and Conflicts: International Political Economy and Crisis, 1914-1945) explores these themes through the theoretical prism of uneven and combined development. He is now developing the PhD thesis into a book monograph provisionally titled Capital, the State and War: Class Conflict and Geopolitics in the Modern Thirty Years Crisis.
Areas of interest: Marxism and Critical Theory; History and theory of International Relations; Historical Sociology; International Political Economy; Origins of the two World Wars; US Foreign Policy; Racism and imperial hierarchy.
Editorial work: He is a member of the editorial collective Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, and an advisory board member of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs of which he was formerly the Managing Editor between September 2008 and March 2010.
How the West came to rule
Richard Braude
40.1 (Feb. 2016): p181.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309816816630709
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Conference of Socialist Economists
http://www.cseweb.org.uk
Alex Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu
How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Global Capitalism, Pluto, London, 2015; 400 pp: 0745336159, 24.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk)
Introduction
Eight hundred years of global history explained! Anievas and Nijancioglu's book is an ambitious attempt to amalgamate discussions in the fields of international relations, global history, Marxism, world-systems theory and historical sociology into a great machine of explanation, the side of which is stamped with the newly repainted letters 'Uneven and Combined Development'. The Trotskyist theory, re-outlined by IR theorists and displayed for discussion and reassemblage, now provides the screen across which the past of the global proletariat can unscroll, and on which to better project the future that awaits it.
Through post-colonial and political theory, the Introduction argues persuasively for an ever more complex understanding of capitalism (p. 9), but also firmly attempts to swat away two erroneous and yet arguably dominant Marxist stories of capitalism's development. In order to battle these theories, the authors draw on the work of a wide breadth of global scholars, slowing down the centripetal force of Europe on world history to understand the dynamics of other agents instead--whether of control or rebellion--in the expansive universe of capitalism's ascendency. Leon Trotsky's theory of 'combined and uneven development' is given a robust defence in Chapter 2. Terms such as 'the whip of external necessity', 'substitutionalism' and 'privilege of backwardness' are put back into a history of party politics and the Bolshevik general's marshaling of his terminology, along with his troops and coterie. The authors do not shrink from providing some obvious criticisms. This includes explaining the theory's reliance on the teleological terms of 'advanced' and 'backward' societies (p. 56), reinterpreting these instead as 'asymmetries and 'imbalances' between societies, rather a directional flow. These opening chapters thus make clear that this is an autocritical work in which the authors wish to correct the racist and patriarchal mistakes of Marxist theory, incorporating not only the histories of production beyond the European frontier, but also the analyses by feminist and non-European scholars. This is an extraordinary ambition: surely few contemporary projects of historical writing have quite so audacious a mission or scope.
Chapter 3 begins the historical journey with the nomadic mode of production on the Mongol grasslands, moving across the trade routes, with the Black Death upon them, into feudal Europe and the demographic crisis which, the authors claim, catapulted Europe into capitalism. Chapter 4 argues for the distinction between tributary and feudal modes of production. The authors then claim that that it was the superior army of the Ottoman tributary mode that halted European expansionism, forcing European powers to look elsewhere--the East and West Indies--for necessary feudal agricultural expansion and merchant trade. In both chapters, Europe reaps the 'privileges of backwardness' in relation to other modes of production.
Chapter 5 moves overseas with the merchant adventurers, first through the Spanish legal theories of Amerindians and the influence of New World map-making on European's conceptions of their home territory, and then the twin rise of New World slavery and industrial capitalism, these last as combined and mutually intertwined systems of production and circulation. Chapter 6 works as a moment of repose in the global whirlwind, turning back to the conflicts within Europe which had begun to be outlined in Chapter 4, and arguing that it was the preoccupation of the majority of European powers either with New World expansionism or battling the Ottoman Empire that allowed Holland and England the geopolitical space' (p. 184) for the political primacy of merchant capital and the early appearance of bourgeois revolutions.
Chapter 7 propels the reader across oceans once again, explaining how Dutch capitalism, far from developing solely on a mercantile basis, relied on the partial colonisation and industrial development of the Indonesian islands in which it did business, exploiting not only labour but also the intersocietal connections built up through previous modes of production. Chapter 8 argues that it was, again, the 'backwardness' of the feudal mode of production of the European states which forced them to develop abnormally dominant military technologies for the sake of overseas expansion--an unevenness which, in the context of industrial capitalism, allowed them to realise imperial ambitions over merchant capitalist states and empires across the surface of the Earth. In a brief and humble conclusion, the authors admit the challenges of any kind of internationalism for both political militants and historians, and point towards the potential for the theory of combined and uneven development to explain the ways in which patriarchy and racism are 'constitutive of, but not reducible to, the emergence of capitalism' (p. 282).
The introductory remarks in the opening chapters need to be read along with those made throughout the book, especially at the start of Chapter 7 (pp. 215-8), which restates much of the theory in different terms, and sometimes with different conclusions. Similarly, pp. 255-6 and 131-4 provide ideas which could have been helpfully assimilated into earlier chapters, especially given that there are two devoted to theoretical prelude alone. No matter, perhaps: at best, this shows that the theory develops along with the material, as it should. However, the path of these clarifications seems to indicate an increasing specificity of the way uneven modes of production combine and develop across international--even intercontinental--lines through history, the persuasiveness of the theory correlating with the increasingly global character of the subject matter. By the time the authors reach a history of India under British rule in the 19th century, the interrelation of military capital, forced Indian de-industrialisation and the Mughal tax system as an explanation for the specificities of British capitalism in India is entirely convincing; but then by Chapter 8, the world has become quite a different place, in which the accumulation of global technologies of transport and communication provide a wealth of opportunities for anyone searching to show the global formation of both capital and class. It is to the application of the theory to the other end of history, however, that I now turn.
Modern history
How the West Came to Rule places itself in opposition to the supposed school of 'political Marxism' represented in the main by the late Ellen Meiksins Wood, Charles Post, Bruno Teschke and, at the fore, Robert Brenner. I am not an uncritical supporter of Brenner's theories. However, I believe that in their eagerness to criticise an orthodoxy taking hold within historical materialist theory, Anievas and Nijancioglu have misunderstood their main opponent. (1)
Brenner's argument did not, and does not, only respond to the commercialising, 'Smithian' model by which capitalism is said to come to rule throughout the world by virtue of increasing global trade and the consequent dominance of merchant capital. This thesis, represented for Anievas and Nijancioglu by Wallerstein's world-system theory, was also that taken for granted in the early 20th century by a range of historians. This 1930s generation of economic historians (foremost among them Richard Tawney and Eileen Power) generally agreed with the commercialising model, and indeed Michael Postan's own doctoral thesis had been on the development of credit in medieval England. However, by 1937, Postan had begun to outline a different model based more firmly on demographic change as an explanation for the economic rise and fall of European nations. After the Second World War (and his stint as the official historian of wartime industry), Postan turned his attention more thoroughly to those kind of national statistics on which the post-War welfare state was built: the metrics of births, deaths, marriages and disease. The mercantilist and monetary model of Keynes's circle had been overcome by a return to Riccardo and Malthus.
That the placing of neither demographic change nor mercantile capital at the centre of a history of global capitalism fitted a Marxist theory of history was not lost on any of the British Marxists of Tawney and Postan's generation. Historians within and without the universities challenged these models, even if perhaps only implicitly, often by focusing attention instead on the rising or falling consciousness of the working classes at different points in history, measured along a metric of incidents of named rebellions. By the time Brenner came to make his intervention against Postan's new 'Malthusian' orthodoxy (one with parallels in works by French and German scholars of the time as well), it should be borne in mind that there was a serious and large body of work by Marxists who had already challenged these theories. Important mention should be given to Joan Thirsk and Eleanor Searle, women on whose work Brenner constructed much of his argument.
I will return to this historiographic thread in a moment. For now, what is important to note is that in 1976, when Brenner came to make his intervention on the agrarian capitalist origins of the English industrial revolution, his primary goal was to oppose not the commercialising model, which had been done away with, but the demographic model of historical development. This is key, because this is exactly the model Anievas and Nijancioglu do not explicitly oppose in How the West Came to Rule, and thus at times, they fall into the same pitfalls Brenner had so articulately undermined.
This is evidenced most in the chapter on the 'long thirteenth century'. The argument of the chapter moves in four moments:
(1) the necessary expansion of trade networks due to the Mongol nomadic mode of production;
(2) contact with Europe and the passing over of the Plague;
(3) the demographic collapse of Europe; and
(4) the consequent increased availability of land in relation to labour and the development, 'out of necessity', of agriculture and manufacture 'along more capitalist lines' (p. 85).
While the attempt made to relate the methods of nomadic life in Asia to the development of capitalism in Europe is laudable, each step seems to me fairly weak. First, nomadic production could equally lead to internalism as externalism; and second, the Plague could have developed in any part of the world and moved through other trade routes--describing the Black Death as a result of combined and uneven development seems to hold as true as describing the meteor which wiped out the dinosaurs as a result of the peculiarities of the interstellar mode of production (and indeed, the move happens in one single sentence on p. 78, with a little more elaboration, incongruously, on p. 254). Third, the extent of the demographic collapse, its variations across Europe and the importance of the pre-Plague agricultural crises, though mentioned by Anievas and Nisancioglu, are still very much under debate. Most importantly, however, the final fourth stage of this argument is exactly that to which Brenner has responded for nearly 40 years, and to which the authors unfortunately provide no riposte.
Brenner's argument was that there was nothing inherently capitalist about the response to the Black Death, but that the different responses did lay the path for varying alignments of class forces, allowing the cycle of agricultural collapse through population expansion and subsequent agricultural development following population collapse to be broken. Brenner formulates his argument, in an entirely Marxist manner, as a materialist critique of economics. 'Ironically', Brenner argued in 1976, 'Malthus's model was correct not for the emergent industrial economy he was analysing, but for the stagnant backward society from which this had risen.' (2) What needed to be explained therefore was how English and Dutch states had superseded this Malthusian cycle. Indeed, as a scholar of the 17th century, Brenner's real initial question was why England in the period of the Civil War did not suffer the same kind of agricultural collapse that was experienced concurrently on the rest of the continent. For following the Black Death, there was not the kind of capitalistic development which the authors claim for Europe, and not even for England. Instead, there was a clear (if slow) return to the Malthusian cycle. Brenner's argument was that despite the return to this Malthusian 'phase A', the different class structures--the solidarity within both the exploited and exploitative classes--between France and England explained England's development of agrarian capitalism and its break from the Malthusian 'phase B' in the 17th century at the same time as France suffered it.
This argument makes several points to which the authors unfortunately do not respond. Most of all, that there was a significant difference in the 'long thirteenth century' between different European states and polities, which were the root cause for their developmental differentiation. Anievas and Nijancioglu do not acknowledge this aspect of Brenner's argument except to note that the concept of 'combined and uneven development' as employed in his 1982 essay is incomplete; that is, the argument that the English state structure was ultimately indebted to the Norman invasion. Despite noting simply a problem of incompleteness, the authors replace this theorisation of 'the international' with their theory of the combination with the 'nomadic mode of production', rather than delving further into the quite clear 'internationalism' of the Norman Empire itself, which extended as far as Sicily. (3) Furthermore, the argument puts class struggle and composition at the centre of the developmental differences between states, while the authors replace this factor in their chapter on relations with the Ottoman Empire with England's 'privilege of isolation' from the Hapsburg-Ottoman wars (p. 118). This no doubt adds an important geopolitical context to the development of English agrarian capitalism, but it does not follow that if another European state had been similarly isolated that there too agrarian capitalism would have developed. As Brenner might put it, without the prerequisite 'social-property relations', it would not be possible for capitalist tenants to amass the quantity of land necessary for the qualitatively different fixed capital investment that was managed in 16th century England.
Without this analysis, the model falls back into the 'Smithian' model whereby, given the opportunity for specialised market production, peasants would naturally and inevitably choose to specialise. This was the focus of Brenner's most recent contribution to the debate, in which he claimed, continuing his critique of economic models, that Adam Smith was essentially correct in his description of the results of specialisation, the division of labour and the 'obsessive pursuit of the gains from trade', but failed to acknowledge that such processes are only chosen by producers given very particular social-property relations, i.e. those of capitalist history. (4) This distinction between 'capital' and 'capitalism'; that is, between the methods of the 'obsessive pursuit' and its prerequisite historical conditions is briefly approached by the authors in their introduction to Chapter 7, but unfortunately not applied to the earlier chapters (pp. 216-7).
Theory and historiography
The distinction between the processes of capital and the conditions for capitalism is also a path to return to a theoretical and historiographic division which I began to outline before, that between the Marxist tradition which Brenner helped to start, along with Perry Anderson, and that which he sidestepped, associated with the name of E. P. Thompson. Anievas and Nisancioglu do not make best use of the continued tradition of British Marxist history which Brenner has largely set aside throughout his work, though they do of course draw on it in their description of the formation of a trans-Atlantic proletariat in the 17th and 18th centuries (Chapter 5), assimilating Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's The Many Headed Hydra into their structure of 'combined and uneven development'. The slaves of the Americas, the indentured servants spirited away from England and Ireland, the marooned pirates and their utopias: they all combined to create a truly international proletariat which formed the dreams and labours of the New World.
There was, however, a kind of wider division of academic labour that has dominated this split, between the productive processes of capitalism and the development of the state structures in which these processes have developed and expanded across the globe. For while Anderson and Brenner concentrated on the development of the absolutist state and the legacies of previous modes of production, and Hobsbawm republished Marx's Pre-Capitalist Economic Formulations, the 'Midnight Notes' scholars--Peter Linebaugh, Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis primarily among them (with an important debt to CLR James)--delved into the historical development of capital accumulation, the study of workers' resistance (in a very expanded notion of 'the worker'), and the technologies within the productive process developed to combat this resistance.
There are two practical ways in which I think this conception of capital accumulation, and the Midnight Notes scholars' work, points toward further developments Anievas and Nisancioglu could make on their theory of combined and uneven development. The first is in terms of the place of race, or the 'accumulation of differences', within the capitalist process of production itself. (5) How this reflects on situations globally --not so much in terms of the global division of labour, but within the varying productive processes across the world--is perhaps a theory of race and division that would make better use of Trotsky's theory than the remarks provided thus far by the authors, and not just in Chapters 5 and 7.
The second, and this is where I will end, would be a feminist critique of demographic theory. The theoretical insight that has been drawn on most from Federici's Caliban and the Witch is that the work of creating and raising children is itself a form of unpaid labour (and the hidden root of the creation of labour-power itself)--a form of work that has conceptually and physically formed 'women' in the modern era (pp. 325-6). There is, however, another connected claim that has been often (though certainly not always) passed over, which is the history of resistance to this kind of labour, which needs to be studied both in our contemporary world and in that of the past. The rise and fall of births and deaths; the supervisional metrics of infants, wives and husbands; the supposedly natural habits of family life, which, in aggregation, form the great curves of the statistician's empire, all have their own histories in the production and accumulation of labour-power--histories that undoubtedly contain their own imbalances and asymmetries across different cultures, rebellions and methods of domination (contra Federici, this is a history which profoundly predates the 14th century). Byway of illustration, note Brenner's statement that the subdivision of peasant holdings in feudal Europe 'also enabled peasants to respond to the demands of male children for the wherewithal to start families of their own' (Brenner 2007: 69). It is this naturalisation of the productive basis to demographic change that needs to be interrogated in order to uncover the planetary dimensions to sexual divisions of labour. In other words, Brenner's critique of the Malthusian orthodoxy never reaches far enough into the ideological assumptions that underpin it. This is one way towards the feminist critique the authors promise, but unfortunately do not provide. On the basis of Anievas and Nisancioglu's committed epic, however, scholars across the globe are in a more solid position to unravel these histories.
DOI: 10.1177/0309816816630709
Reviewed by Richard Braude, University of Cambridge, UK
Endnotes
(1.) This is perhaps partly caused by the attempt to treat the school of 'political Marxism' as unitary. Most of the criticisms aimed at it, while following on from an explanation of Brenner's arguments, actually confront claims by Ellen Wood (e.g. p. 32); and the claim that Brenner rejects the theory of immanent change from within the feudal system relies on a misleading citation of Neil Davidson (p. 24).
(2.) In this, he agreed with Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (Brenner R [1985] Agrarian class structure and economic development, in Aston TH, Philpin CHE (eds.) The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, Cambridge, p. 14.
(3.) See David Bates's 2013 The Normans and Empire, and Eleanor Searle's Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988.
(4.) Brenner R (2007) Property and progress: Where Adam Smith went wrong, in Wickham C (ed.) Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century, Oxford, p. 100. Anievas and Nijancioglu attempt to counter the argument regarding the peasant's 'choice' to marketise by citing the Postan School's inheritors, Mark Bailey and Jane Whittle. They do so, however, without drawing either on Spencer Dimmock's important critiques (although his book does appear in a footnote) or on what seems to me the far more pressing matter, which is that even if some peasants chose to produce for the market, this does not show the kind of systemic, overall change to which Brenner pointed. Indeed, it might simply be adduced as evidence of the class division within the peasantry, often expressed as 'the rise of the yeoman', who became the capitalist tenant farmer in Brenner's model.
(5.) A phrase the authors borrowed from Silvia Federici's (2004) Caliban and the Witch, Brooklyn, p. 63. The authors themselves note the need to more thoroughly apply Federici's ideas in future (p. 326).
Richard Braude is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge, UK.
Braude, Richard
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Braude, Richard. "How the West came to rule." Capital & Class, vol. 40, no. 1, 2016, p. 181+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA448569400&it=r&asid=64d42102350fd2898201a68d3a68b069. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A448569400
Anievas, Alexander. How the West came to rule: the geopolitical origins of capitalism
K.M. Zaarour
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1235.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Anievas, Alexander. How the West came to rule: the geopolitical origins of capitalism, by Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu. Pluto, 2015. 386p index afp ISBN 9780745336152 pbk, $40.00
(cc) 53-3709
HB501
MARC
Anievas (Univ. of Cambridge, UK) and Ni^ancioglu (Univ. of Westminster, UK) have succeeded in providing new theoretical and historical perspectives to explain how capitalism prevailed to become a dominant force in global affairs. They offer a fundamental rethinking of the origins of capitalism and the emergence of Western domination by the interactive relations with the non-European world. They reject the liberal view that capitalism is considered pacifying and civilizing through the spread of free trade and markets where societies are transformed into positive-sum games. The authors believe this liberal view is at odds with the historical record of capitalism underlying the histories of subjugation and exploitation that lay behind the rise Western exceptionalism. Instead, the authors offer a counterargument by suggesting that capitalism came to dominate, subordinate, and exploit non-European societies, creating the alienation of workers and uneven development and wealth. Therefore, they contend that capitalism could only emerge, take root, and reproduce itself through a violent, coercive, and often war-assisted process of subjugating, dominating, and often annihilating many of those social forces that stood in its way. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. All readership levels.--K. M. Zaarour, Virginia Tech
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Zaarour, K.M. "Anievas, Alexander. How the West came to rule: the geopolitical origins of capitalism." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1235. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661840&it=r&asid=b22a45faea3de430e5a63dfcaa62339d. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661840
Alexander Anievas (ed.): Marxism and World Politics: Contesting Global Capitalism
Hugo Radice
35.3 (Oct. 2011): p487.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309816811420273
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Conference of Socialist Economists
http://www.cseweb.org.uk
Alexander Anievas (ed.) Marxism and World Politics: Contesting Global Capitalism, Routledge: London, 2010; xii + 279 pp.: 9780415478038 26.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk)
The essays in this volume mostly originated in debates in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs over the question of how Marxism deals with the historical fact that capitalism has developed within a multiplicity of states. This seems to be a problem mostly for academics working in the field of international relations (IR), where Marxism has, with considerable success, carved out a space from which to challenge the dual hegemony of realist and liberal approaches. IR is constituted for realists by the permanent existence of a system of rivalrous polities; for liberals, on the other hand, this system can be refashioned by political agency, guided by the Kantian ideal of a cosmopolitan world order. Marxism, however, turns first one way and then the other: on one hand, theories of imperialism and global hegemony show affinities with realism; while on the other hand, the ambition 'workers of the world, unite!' seems to stand firmly in the Kantian tradition.
In his editorial introduction, Anievas suggests that a Marxist IR should be characterised by 'four principles of analysis--historicism, critical realism, methodological holism, theory-praxis nexus' (pp. 3-4). Yet with regard to the deployment of these worthy principles, each remains subject to sharp debate, as the subsequent essays show. He groups them under two headings: first, the geopolitics of capitalist modernity (exploring connections between capitalism and the states system); and second, Marxism and the international (exploring the standing of the study of the states system within Marxism). However, there is in practice no visible difference in the subject-matter of the two parts.
The great virtue of this collection is that it reveals, in the convenient form of brief and mostly well-presented essays, the views of a range of major contributors to recent debates on these issues. Unfortunately, there are some important absentees, and while the contributions of Robert Brenner, David Harvey and Ellen Meiksins Wood are repeatedly invoked, the Open Marxists are studiously ignored, along with the large progressive wing of mainstream international political economy whose empirical analyses also merit attention. Given that it would take far too long to summarise each contribution, what overall themes emerge?
First, remarkably little attention is given to the changes in the institutions and practices of capitalism that have together constituted neoliberal globalisation: the spread of TNCS and global finance, the explosion in the range and weight of inter-governmental organisations, and above all, the remarkable dynamism of accumulation in the global south. For the neo-Gramscians (Mark Rupert, Adam David Morton), and the transnationalists (William Robinson, Kees van der Pijl), they are crucial evidence of genuine change in the political economy of capitalism, as some of us argued already in the 1970s. For the Trotskyists (Alex Callinicos, San Ashman, Jamie Allinson/Alex Anievas, Nell Davidson, Peter Gowan), the 'historical Marxists' (Benno Teschke, Hannes Lacher, Justin Rosenberg) and the sympathetic non-Marxists (John Hobson, Simon Bromley), they appear to be of secondary importance at best.
Second, what about the dynamics of capitalism? Here, not only the Trotskyists but also the absent 'political Marxists' (Brenner and Wood) and the influential Harvey, are shackled by their commitment to orthodox Marxist economics and its tale of perpetual crisis (forty years and counting). Forever predicting capitalism's imminent demise, for them the great mystery is why on earth capitalism continues to exist. Having spent too much time in the fantastical world of Marxological exegetics, they combine the incantation of ritual phrases (crisis, falling rate of profit, overaccumulation) with an uncritical search for empirical evidence in the account-books of the bourgeoisie. The jury is still out on whether the neo-Gramscians and the historical Marxists go along with this, but they risk being dragged in, if this collection is anything to go by.
Furthermore, the attraction of Trotsky's banal concept of uneven and combined development is mystifying, especially since it is argued to be the result of competition, theorised in an essentially neoclassical way. In their contributions to this volume, the Trotskyists succeed only in rediscovering the competition state, as analysed nearly twenty years ago by non-Marxists such as Susan Strange, Phil Cerny and Peter Hall. Here there is no substitute for giving close attention to the analysis of neoliberalism through a detailed reconstruction of its historical development; for as Marx said in relation to capitalism's seemingly impossible tricks of reinvention, quoting Galileo to his inquisitors: eppur si muove (nevertheless, it works).
In conclusion, given the editor's useful checklist of what a Marxist in should look like, the Trotskyists in particular have a long way to go. Their 'historicism' amounts to forcing all historical events and trends since 1917 into the mould of the Leninist account of imperialism, albeit with modest alterations in some secondary features. Their 'critical realism' entails a mechanical disavowal of essentialism and economism, rather than a systematic investigation of how the contradictory character of capital exposed by Marx is actually realised. Their 'methodological holism' boils down to a shallow conflation of reductionist economics with voluntarist politics ('two logics' indeed!). Finally, their 'theory-praxis nexus' is wholly invisible in this collection, but it would seem to involve nothing more or less than an unspoken commitment to a historically-discredited Bolshevism.
Reviewed by Hugo Radice, University of Leeds, UK
Hugo Radice is a life fellow in the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds. His current work focuses on financialisation and the global crisis.
DOI: 10.1177/0309816811420273
Radice, Hugo
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Radice, Hugo. "Alexander Anievas (ed.): Marxism and World Politics: Contesting Global Capitalism." Capital & Class, vol. 35, no. 3, 2011, p. 487+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA272165995&it=r&asid=448c54457756221ab541da691db76329. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A272165995
The uneven and combined development of world capitalism
Review by Ashley Smith
Issue #100: Reviews
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How the West Came to Rule::
The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism
By Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu
Pluto Press, 2015 · 386 pages · $40.00
The debate between Marxists about the origins of capitalism has divided into two broad camps—World Systems Theory and Political Marxism. While each has its insights, they are both one-sided: the first calling attention to the external processes of commercial trade as the principle cause of the rise of capitalism, and the second to the internal transformations of class relations in the English countryside.
Both, however, only capture a part of Marx’s original sketch in Capital of how the system came into being. For Marx, the triumph of the capitalist mode of production over its feudal and tributary predecessors was an international process that combined geopolitics, commerce, class struggle within societies, bourgeois revolution, the conquest of the Americas and the system of plantation slavery, and colonialism.
In their new book, How the West Came to Rule, Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu defend and develop Marx’s original account. Their book is a provocative and brilliant theoretical and historical explanation of how capitalism emerged in England and Europe through a dialectical inter-societal process.
One of their principle aims is to undermine a Eurocentric bias that has compromised both camps in the transition debate. Each wrongly grants priority to Europe, presumes capitalism emerged within it as a closed space, and depicts the system developing in a linear process throughout the rest of the world. They contend that these assumptions are neither theoretically nor empirically tenable and deny the agency and contribution of non-Western societies to the emergence of capitalism.
They argue that while World Systems Theory describes the international process of commerce and plunder, it is plagued by several key problems. It remains within a Eurocentric framework that sees capitalism developing within Europe and then sweeping through the rest of the world. In the process they reduce non-Western societies to a passive role.
Anievas and Nisancioglu also affirm Robert Brenner’s contention that World Systems Theory suffers from a Smithian definition of capitalism as simply commerce. Since trade is a feature of almost all human societies, World Systems Theory fails to grasp the specific nature of capitalism’s historical emergence, its class relations, and laws of motion.
The authors show, however, that Brenner’s alternative case is compromised by problems of its own. Famously, Brenner contended that capitalism was the contingent result of class struggle between lords and peasants in the English countryside. That conflict transformed lords into agrarian capitalists and their former peasants eventually into wage laborers, both dependent for their social reproduction on the capitalist market.
Brenner’s Political Marxism suffers from Eurocentrism, if not Anglocentrism. Anievas and Nisancioglu show how it excludes the international processes of trade, geopolitical competition between European feudal states and the Ottoman Empire, primitive accumulation in the Americas, and colonialism, all of which were decisive in establishing the conditions allowing for the capitalist breakthrough in Holland as well as England.
To break out of the pervasive Eurocentrism in the debate, they turn to Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development. Using unnecessarily opaque language, the authors argue that Trotsky’s theory
uniquely interpolates an international dimension of causality as an intrinsic aspect of sociohistorical development itself. This then allows for the organic—rather than contingent or external—integration of the “geopolitical” and “sociological” determinations into a single, unified theory of sociohistorical change, sublating “internalist” and “externalist” theories of modal transitions.
Trotsky argued that the capitalist mode of production transformed the general law of uneven development, which holds that societies grow at different paces, some faster and others slower at various points in time. He maintained that capitalism’s unique expansionary qualities led it to penetrate precapitalist modes of production, subordinating their economies and states to its laws of development. It thus produced hybrid societies, combining the worlds most advanced and backward features.
His paradigmatic example was of course Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. It had been a backward, feudal society ruled by the autocratic tsarist state. European capitalism penetrated it toward the end of the nineteenth century, producing a hybrid formation that combined advanced capitalist development with backward feudal relations.
Trotsky later generalized this capitalist law of uneven and combined development to the colonial world. Based on this analysis, Trotsky argued that workers even though a minority in such societies could lead the peasants in what he called a permanent revolution for socialism on the condition that it spread to the advanced capitalist world. Successful revolutions there could help them overcome their economic backwardness.
Anievas and Nisancioglu use uneven and combined development as a methodology to show how capitalism came into being through an international, inter-societal process. They demonstrate how more developed tributary modes of production in societies like China and the Ottoman empire suffered the “penalty of progressiveness;” their more advanced economic systems and stable states stifled the development of capitalism within their societies.
By contrast the economic and geopolitical interaction between them and less-developed feudal Europe, in particular Holland and England, granted them the “privilege of historical backwardness,” as they incorporated more advanced productive forces from elsewhere. Moreover, under “the whip of external necessity,” Europe was forced to compete geopolitically with their more advanced rivals, a dynamic that provided the condition for the development of capitalism in Holland and England.
With this framework, Anievas and Nisancioglu radically recast the process of capitalist development as the result of the inter-societal interaction between European feudalism and the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the conquest of the Americas, the establishment of the slave trade and plantations, and the colonization of Asia. This international history is perhaps their book’s most significant contribution.
They begin by demonstrating how the Mongol Empire spurred the development of merchant capital throughout Europe. The Pax Mongolica opened up the Silk Road, dramatically increased trade, and transferred the Empire’s higher development of its productive forces to backward Europe. This encouraged the formations of cities, which had a gravitational pull on peasants to leave the countryside and become wage laborers especially in the Italian city-states.
The Mongol Empire was also the source of bubonic plague that caused the Black Death in Europe, which decisively changed the balance of class forces in England, driving lords to become capitalist farmers and peasants to become rural laborers. Thus the Pax Mongolica forms an international precondition for the rise of English agrarian capitalism recounted by Brenner.
But, Anievas and Nisancioglu contend, without the geopolitical competition from the Ottoman Empire Holland and England would never have undergone the transition to capitalism. The Ottoman’s more advanced tributary mode of production buttressed a more stable, unified state compared to Europe’s squabbling feudal states. As a result, they were able to deploy a far larger military force against their rivals in Europe.
The most powerful state in Europe, the Hapsburg Empire, had no choice but to deploy a disproportionate amount of its forces against the Ottomans. The geopolitical rivalry between the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans facilitated Holland and England’s capitalist development in two ways. First it offered their merchants significant trade opportunities. Second it provided them the geopolitical space to develop capitalism and complete their bourgeois revolutions.
With the Hapsburgs preoccupied, Holland managed to successfully carry through the Dutch Revolt and establish the first capitalist nation state. In England, the Hapsburg’s preoccupation with the Ottomans ensured their isolation from any threat, and led to a relative demilitarization of the feudal lords, thereby weakening their power over the peasantry and compelling some of them, in the wake of the Black Death, to adopt a capitalist agriculture.
However, without the conquest of the Americas and the development of plantation slavery, Anievas and Nisancioglu argue, the new capitalist powers could have been strangled in their cribs and certainly would not have undergone capitalist industrialization. The Ottoman’s were the principal reason that the European societies reoriented from the Mediterranean to the so-called New World. And once they did, the plunder of the region reinforced the differential patterns of development between the feudal absolutist powers like Spain and those of the newly capitalist Holland and England. Driven by its feudal military preoccupation of competing with the Ottoman’s, Spain used its horde of gold and silver to pay off loans it had taken out to pay for its military. Much of that treasure ended back in Holland and England to expand their new system.
Anievas and Nisancioglu also show how the colonial slave trade and the hybrid labor regime of plantation slavery, which fused capitalist pressures of production for the market with precapitalist relations of production, provided the raw material for industrialization—cotton for example being the basis for England’s textile boom.
The combination of these inter-societal dynamics thus made possible capitalist development in Holland, England, and eventually the rest of Europe. But this was not an evolutionary process. They argue bourgeois revolutions were necessary to establish capitalist states to defend and reproduce capitalist class rule internally against the exploited classes and internationally against both capitalist and pre-capitalist rivals.
Anievas and Nisancioglu adopt a consequentialist theory of the bourgeois revolutions, pioneered by many, but most fully developed by Neil Davidson in his magisterial How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions. They show how a combination of capitalist lords, merchants, industrialists, and their bourgeois representatives, such as lawyers, led the revolutions in countries like Holland, England, and France. In later bourgeois revolutions, precapitalist classes often carried them out from above in Germany, Japan, and elsewhere. But all built new states that facilitated capitalist development.
Once established in the European metropole, they argue, capitalism could still have been strangled by its own contradictions, in particular its internal tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The European capitalist powers, in particular Holland and England, overcame these and other obstacles to capitalist development through their penetration of markets in the Americas and Asia. With these obstacles overcome, the European powers achieved a decisive advantage over the previously dominant tributary powers like China and the Ottomans that they carved up through imperial warfare. Thus, the West came to rule.
Anievas and Nisancioglu have written an innovative and brilliant work of historical sociology. Unfortunately its academic language is opaque at points making it unnecessarily difficult to read. Beside that there are some serious questions to be asked about their argument.
Many have rightly challenged their expansion of Trotsky’s law of uneven and combined development to analyze pre-capitalist societies like the Mongol Empire and its interaction with European feudalism. Trotsky mainly argued that this law applied to capitalism, since as a mode of production it is uniquely expansionary compared to other modes of production, and therefore has the capacity to subordinate and transform development. For the most part, Anievas and Nisancioglu might be better served by seeing the pre-capitalist interactions through the law of uneven development, since in the main they do not reveal genuine hybrid social formations in their discussion of these societies, but a dynamic of competition, commodity exchange, and transfer of productive forces.
In their discussion of capitalism, they endorse Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument in Provincializing Europe as a superior way for understanding the differences between advanced and developing capitalist societies than that of Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. Chakrabarty divides capitalism’s history into two parts: History 1 encompasses the system’s universalizing tendency to subordinate all laborers to its laws regardless of national particularity; and History 2 includes all the social particularities in each and every society like, in Chakrabarty’s words, human being’s “bodily habits,” religious “gods and spirits,” and “unselfconscious collective practices” that are “constantly interrupting the totalizing thrusts of History 1.”
Anievas and Nisancioglu correctly criticize Chibber for claiming that Chakrabarty assigns the West to History 1 and postcolonial societies to History 2. Chakrabarty makes clear that both histories inhere in all capitalist societies. They also may have a point that Chibber’s emphasis on capitalist universalization weakens our ability to adequately explain how capitalism universally imposes its laws of motion on all societies and at the same time produces social differences between societies.
But there is much to be lost in becoming hostage to Chakrabarty’s Heiddegerian mysticism and poststructuralist politics of difference between societies that posits a difference of kind between the West and the Orient. As Vasant Kaiwar warns in The Postcolonial Orient, with Chakrabarty, “we end up with a sentimental, postmodernist Third-Worldism.”
Anievas and Nisancioglu would be better served by sticking with Trotsky’s law of uneven and combined development, a law that Chakrabarty, by the way, dismisses along with the law of uneven development as an obstacle to understanding the postcolonial world. In fact, it is a far better basis, as Anievas and Nisancioglu themselves demonstrate, for explaining capitalism’s tendency to impose its logic on all societies and at the same time produce peculiarities in each and every society it transforms.
Anievas and Nisancioglu’s aversion to what they worry are ideal-typical or reductionist definitions of capitalism such as the Political Marxist’s market dependency or the more classical Marxist definition of the competitive exploitation of wage labor leaves them with a rather vague definition of capitalism. Thus they write,
Capitalism is best understood as a set of configurations, assemblages, or bundles of social relations and processes oriented around the systematic reproduction of the capital relation, but not reducible—either historically or logically—to that relation alone. . . . These relations may take numerous forms, such as coercive state apparatuses, ideologies and cultures of consent, or forms of power and exploitation that are not immediately given in or derivative of the simple capital-wage-labor relation, such as racism and patriarchy.
This viewpoint—tacked on and undeveloped—likely leads them in their conclusion, whose political generalizations seem in contrast to the rest of their arguments, to some questionable criticisms of Marxist arguments about the revolutionary party, and class struggle and its relation to movements against oppression.
They present a straw man conception of the revolutionary party, contenting that it is
the organizational form, in which political differences are ironed out, unity among disparate parts realized, and a homogeneous political perspective pursued. In turn, the perspectives constructed by the leadership of parties and organizations are presented as the historical prime mover—the royal road—which simply needs to replicated everywhere for capitalism to be overthrown.
The authors also claim that the Left committed to building parties assumes that it has all the answers already, imparts them in a top down way to workers and the oppressed, and sees political differences as something that “must be directed onto the True Path” or “exiled as a ‘bourgeois deviation.’” What they are describing is a sect, not a party. Certainly there are such sects, but they very rarely, if ever, play a leading role in any kind of struggle, let alone revolution.
Anievas and Nisancioglu’s vague definition of capitalism leads them to decenter the working class as the pivotal agent of socialist revolution. This is ironic since Trotsky used the law of uneven and combined development, which is the core of their book, as the scientific basis of his strategy of permanent revolution, a strategy that underscored the central role of the working class in leading the rest of exploited and oppressed in revolution. By contrast they go so far as to ask, “might it be time to rethink the privileged revolutionary subject (the proletariat) in broader terms than its traditional, singular association with waged labor?”
Drawing on theories of intersectionality, they want to dynamically integrate struggles against exploitation and oppression as all part of the anti-capitalist struggle. In doing so they rightly challenge Political Marxists like Ellen Meiksins Wood who argue that class exploitation is essential to capitalism while oppressions of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality are not. Instead, they argue that capitalism is equally dependent on class, race, gender, and other oppressions. They advocate, therefore, that all struggles pose equivalent threats to the system.
They have a point but they take it too far. Capitalism rests on the competitive exploitation of wage labor; it is the basis of the entire system. At the same time, various oppressions are an inextricable part of it. For example, women’s oppression through their disproportionate burden in the social reproduction of labor is an essential part of capitalism today.
Recognizing the constituent nature of capital-wage labor relation to the system does not diminish struggles against oppression. They are absolutely necessary to unite workers to overthrow the capitalist class, and within oppressed groups, which themselves consist of groups with different class interests, workers’ have the most interest in carrying the liberation struggle the furthest. Anti-capitalist struggles can start on any number of fronts, including against aspects of oppression, but if it does not win at the point of production, the system with all its sundry oppressions, cannot be overthrown.
Regardless of these questions and criticisms, Anievas and Nisancioglu have made an enormous contribution to redressing the one-sided debates about the origins of capitalism and the West’s conquest of the planet. Their book should be read by anyone hoping to understand as well as challenge Eurocentrism, imperialism, and the capitalist system as a whole.
'How the West Came to Rule' by Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu
How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism
Pluto Press, London, 2015. 386pp., £24.99 pb
ISBN 9780745336152
Reviewed by Tony Mckenna
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About the reviewer
Tony Mckenna
Tony Mckenna’s work appears in The Huffington Post, ABC Australia, The United Nations, New Statesman, The Progressive, New Internationalist, New Humanist, Ceasefire Magazine, Monthly Review, Science and Society, Critique, Rethinking Marxism, and others. His first book was on Art, Literature and Culture; the second, on Joseph Stalin, is out now.
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19 October 2015
References
One of the most intriguing areas of Marxist scholarship centres around the ‘transition debate’: that is, the controversy surrounding the way capitalist relations developed out of the old world, and the processes by which they achieved ascendency. The debate spans from Marx’s own fragmented observations – which suggest that capitalist relations were cultivated first in Northern Italy, only to be prematurely stifled – to the development of Political Marxism a century later, which tended to be more emphatic and Anglo-centric in tone (especially among its later followers), emphasising the role and significance of the English countryside in the 14th century. Coeval with the geographic question, was the way capitalist social relations developed ontologically, so to speak: Were they - in the old Marxist parlance - incubated in the womb and contradictions of the old (feudal) order – or was the set of relations of the feudal-agricultural world increasingly corrupted and ‘capitalised’ by the rise of trade, external markets, and the corroding imperatives of exchange value? The latter debate was, of course, famously hashed out in the pages of the journal Science and Society, by Sweezy, Dobb and others way back in the 1950s.
But wherever you stand on these issues one thing seems clear, that is - the ‘transition debate’ has been conducted, in the main, on firmly European ground. Other issues have been referenced: the role of the Atlantic slave trade on the processes of European primitive accumulation, for example, is heavily underscored in Marx’s Capital and has recently received detailed treatment by Robin Blackburn among others, but the attempt to provide a totalising analysis, which seeks the complex web of interactions between older modes of production and capitalist trends on a world scale; an analysis which is designed to demonstrate just how heavily the emergence of modern capitalism was dependent on the interactions between older empires, newer powers - and the subsumption of a variety of forms of labour which came to provide, so to say – capital’s amniotic fluid: such an analysis has yet to reach fruition. Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu’s How the West Came to Rule is an exciting and engaging effort precisely because it goes a good way toward providing this type of account. Specifically, it utilizes the Trotskyist analytical method of uneven and combined development as a means to unpick some of the deadlocks the more localised accounts of the transition problem have yielded.
In this book the authors first provide a summary of the history of the transition debate, paying particular attention to the eurocentrism (or later Anglo-centrism) of political Marxism and the tendency toward ahistoricity which is built into World-System Theory. Other chapters involve a consideration of the Mongolian Empire and the way in which it facilitated a trade network from the more developed East to the European backwaters, and how the effects of the plague it also helped transmit would significantly alter the value of peasant labour - undermining the balance of class forces in feudal Europe – and leavening the way for spots of capitalist development thereby. The authors go on to consider the Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry of the ‘long sixteenth century’, and the manner in which it provided a breathing space for the development of those countries on the European periphery whose economic trajectories were already developing in a capitalist direction - like England and the Northern Netherlands.
The ‘discovery’ and colonisation of the Americas (itself partially a result of the Ottoman ascent and its seizure of Constantinople in 1453) – is given detailed consideration, in terms of both the subjugation of African slaves on an international level, and the decimations of the indigenous populations which took place in both North America and Latin America; alongside the hybrid social systems which pertained in the aftermath, and the way their economic activity fed back into shaping the political landscape of the European nations. Likewise the relationship between the European nations and their counterparts in the East is examined in depth; specifically the way the Dutch were able to subsume South Asian regions like Singapore and Indonesia in a world market which was directed by the Dutch Republic, and which provided a vital impetus for the further development of capitalism in the United Provinces – and also the way British capital was able to subordinate the Indian market to itself in and through the imperial conquest of the remnants of the Mughal Empire. In addition, the book provides an examination of the concept of bourgeois revolution, focusing in particular on the English, Dutch and French variants.
There are many high spots in the analysis. The account of the class relations and the historical development of the Ottoman Empire is clear but also profound. The authors demonstrate persuasively how its tributary mode of production entailed all sorts of advancements on the feudal empires it was pulled into contact with on its western flank. The extraction of the surplus product of peasant labour was achieved through ‘the preponderance of taxation as a mechanism … regulated by regional and central agents of the Ottoman state’ (99). This had several consequences, not least of which was that the power of the upper classes based on the land was substantially weaker than that of its western feudal counterparts, for its access to the surplus product was directly mediated by the central state, ‘almost all land was formerly owned by the Sultan, while military fiefs – timars – were predominantly nonhereditary, changeable, and regularly rotated’ (99). The power of a landed ‘nobility’ could not congeal in the way it might in feudal terms, and thus the Ottoman tributary system was essentially more stable, less prone to fragmentation in the way the more parcellized, competing elements of ruling class feudal power were.
But it was precisely its advanced character which, at a certain point, placed the Ottoman state at a distinct disadvantage with regard to its feudal opposition. From within the fragmented polities of feudal power, forms of private property could be more effectively cultivated. A class of merchants were allowed to develop whose commercial activities attained a relative independence from the centralised state – in contrast to the Ottomans where the ‘subordination of merchants to the tributary state was also evident geopolitically’ (105). The Ottoman state, according to the logic of its own mode of production, had to capture and tightly regulate the tributaries by which the surpluses flowed from the exploited subaltern territories. Such acts of conquest and taxation were facilitated by complex ‘mechanisms of social reproduction’ (103), which included a highly centralised army and bureaucracy that operated by ‘controlling coin circulation, production and prices’ (105). Market relations were not unheard of, but they were severely regulated and even stifled – ‘anti luxury laws were deployed to confiscate merchant fortunes’ (105).
The suppression of the market had far-reaching consequences in the way in which the Ottomans waged war; the funds were often extracted from the peasantry directly and en masse, whereas feudal lords were more liable to bolster intensive, concentrated forms of direct exploitation with loan agreements with wealthy merchants or international banking houses, and thus the logic of a market economy, of exchange value, could more fundamentally penetrate the means of social reproduction. Finally, because the means of exploitation were ‘dispersed across the nobility’ (104) in the feudal case, the peasant tended to have little legal recourse against the lord who was directly exploiting him, a lord who could often set the legal limits of that exploitation. In a centralised bureaucratic state this was less so, the peasants had greater access to their own surplus product, and this often meant they were less rebellious then their western European counterparts; the contours of class struggle, therefore, were somewhat less pronounced. This would prove significant, of course, in light of the peasant rebellions which broke out throughout the 14th century in particular, and were part and parcel of the way peasant labour was able to detach itself from its feudal premise.
The authors’ analysis of the ‘encomienda’ – the legally enshrined framework of exploitation which arose in the aftermath of the colonisation of Latin America – is likewise highly impressive. They articulate the way in which the Spanish preserved many of the productive relations which had characterised the pre-Colombian world. In Mexico, for instance, the tributary form of the Aztec Empire was largely maintained – a form “in which the direct producers retained access to the means of production and formal vestiges of kin-based, ‘communal’ social relations persisted, while indigenous elites extracted surpluses from these producers through ‘extra economic’ means”(130). Rather than impose its own style of Iberian feudalism, the Spanish crown granted parcels of land - or encomiendas - to those conquistadores whom it favoured, and the latter were then allowed to extract a tax in terms of goods, money or labour services from the Amerindian inhabitants who fell under the remit of the given territory. The granting of an encomienda did not confer on the trustee any property rights (which still accrued to the crown) and its period of use was merely temporary. Just like under the Ottomans, the central state (the Spanish Crown) could rotate its imperial functionaries, and thereby curtail their power. The encomienda, then, was the product of an uneven and combined development - which arose from the combination of the old tributary forms with the nature of Spanish colonialism – specifically the tension between the colonists and the crown, as the latter sought to limit the power of the former. Amerindian Slavery too was abolished in Latin America, precisely because the danger of private property accrued through the ownership of persons could well bolster the power of the colonists at the expense of the crown.
Following Marx, the authors note how the plundering of the Americas was key to capitalist development in England in the run up to the industrial revolution. As Marx noted, capital invested in the colonies allows for a profit rate which ‘is generally higher there on account of the lower degree of development, and so too is the exploitation of labour through the use of slaves and coolies, etc… there is no reason why the higher rates of profit … should not enter into the equalization of the general rate of profit’ (Cited 163). Consequently the higher rate of exploitation which more backward forms of labour offered in the colonies could be refracted back into the colonial heartland and thereby counteract the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, while also providing an outlet by which a surplus population who had fallen through the gaps during the centuries of long, interminable and painful processes of primitive accumulation could be absorbed. In other words, the colonies were the key by which the limits of England’s domestic agrarian capitalism were to be transcended, and the breakthrough to industrial capitalism was to be secured.
The analysis of the Dutch Republic and its developing empire unfolds along similar lines. Again, the use of the theory of uneven and combined development is integral to the account. The Dutch mode of exploitation already revealed a significantly capitalist character in and through the creation of the ‘joint stock company’ (VOC), which, through its internalisation of protection costs, could become the pivot around which ‘the logics of territorialism and capitalism were united’ (223). The VOC created a link between the investors and managers at home and the political decision-making process which sustained the empire and the logic of its imperialism abroad. The form of exploitation which Dutch imperialism adopted more and more tended toward ‘going beyond activity in the circulation process and intervening directly in production, assuming both ownership and control of the direct production process’ (242).
The authors cite the example of a silk-reeling centre in Bengal which ‘initially employed over 3000 reelers before being reconstructed in 1715 to accommodate over 4,00 workers … while also providing them with equipment, working space and raw materials’ (242). These techniques and methods deployed at the level of production – across the constellation of Dutch interests, which dotted the East Indies during the period - were combined and fused with the indigenous forms of labour which they encountered there – ‘a multiplicity of uneven forms – advances, debt peonage, corvées, plantations and wage labour’ (243). Such a fusion guaranteed the Dutch something of an integrated monopoly based on the control of the production of goods, and thereby allowed for the broader regulation of a world market where cheap production and labour costs could be exploited to the hilt. At the same time, this also provided the means by which the domestic economy of the Netherlands - which was now based primarily on wage-labour, but suffered from a deficit of labourers – could be augmented by the surfeit of cheap labour abroad, and thus overall wages could fall. All of this helped Dutch capitalism to pass the threshold of its own local limits.
How the West Came to Rule is an excellent, inventive and fascinating piece of scholarship; it is all the more remarkable because it is able to condense a complex of vast and contrary trends, in and through the lens of uneven and combined development, and to demonstrate how they intersect at the point of capital development. It achieves this, for the most part, with clarity and conviction. There are, however, occasional weak spots in the analysis. The chapter on ‘pure theory’ – on uneven and combined development – at times lurches into the abstruse, clunky, Althusserian-type language which is so often considered a mark of distinction and profundity in academia today, and it indulges a certain relativism with regards to the objective economic categories of ‘backward’ and ‘advanced’. So, for example, we are informed that ‘a social formation such as the Habsburg or Ottoman Empire during the 16th century might be considered more “advanced” than, say, the emerging capitalist societies of the United Provinces or England’ (56). Perhaps more significantly – although the authors have a very strong case in terms of rehabilitating the role of non-western European nations, territories and older labour practises in the development of capitalism – it is a case they are sometimes liable to overstate. In my view, they overestimate the productive capacity of plantation slavery, and this leads them to misconstrue its relation to the ontological nature of capitalism.
For instance, they argue that ‘capitalism utilises exploitation and oppression – beyond the formally free exchange of labour power for wages … The violence that inheres in forms of exploitation such as slavery … is not external to capitalism, but constitutive of its very ontology’(278). This is highly problematic. Developed capitalism and generalised wage-labour is antithetical to slavery – for in the long term, wage labour is always going to be more productive. In the processes of primitive accumulation, when the capitalist economy as a whole is still fragmented and disparate, and its level of productive technique still relatively immature, the immediacies of naked exploitation that the slave system offers can be key to pulling it (developed capitalism) into being. But once the capitalist economy is established, it is compelled to abolish slavery; the methods of violence which underpin capitalist exploitation consequently lose the immediate ‘extra-economic’ essence which is characteristic of the slave mode of production. (I suppose one might make an exception for those cases of capitalism in acute crisis – Nazi militarism for instance - which actually revived and integrated slavery into its mode of production.)
Nevertheless, How the West Came to Rule is an exemplary scholarly achievement, providing a powerful riposte to Political Marxism, and an important step forward in a vital debate.
'Marxism and World Politics' by Alexander Anievas (ed) Alexander Anievas (ed)
Marxism and World Politics
Routledge, London, 2010, £25.99 pb
ISBN 9780415478038
Reviewed by Paul Blackledge
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About the reviewer
Paul Blackledge
Paul Blackledge is professor of political theory and UCU Branch Secretary at Leeds Beckett University. He is also a member of the NEC of UCU and the author of Marxism and Ethics (SUNY Press, 2012).
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Review
If the 1990s was the decade of globalisation, the first decade of the twenty-first century was marked by theory’s return to imperialism. This shouldn’t have happened according to those hyper-globalisation theorists who preached the death of the state in the decades before 9/11. Nonetheless, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and more latterly the halting NATO’s eastward spread by Russia in South Ossetia have put the concept of imperialism back at the centre of intellectual debate. If posers like Niall Fergusson celebrate the practice, more serious work has reengaged with the classical Marxist theories – associated with the writings of Lenin, Bukharin, Hilferding, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and Kautsky. The collection under review is an important contribution to these debates, and deserves serious consideration by anyone interested in understanding how the modern world works.
After a useful introduction which frames the recent return to imperialism, the book’s first substantive essay is by Alex Callinicos. Originally published in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs in 2007, Callinicos’s piece acts not only as a taster for his important Imperialism and Global Political Economy (Polity, 2009) but also as a useful introduction to the debate amongst Marxists on the nature of imperialism. On the latter point, Callinicos points to three main currents amongst contemporary Marxists. The first, showing the most continuity with the debates of the 1990s is associated with the works of William Robinson. He deepens the globalisation argument to posit contemporary imperialism as a strategy to extend capitalist social relations underpinned by a developing transnational capitalist class rooted in transnational capitalist production. A second group, associated with the editors of the Socialist Register and to a lesser degree with those of New Left Review conceives contemporary imperialism primarily through the lens of America’s struggle for hegemony to which other leading capitalist powers are subordinate. A third approach, exemplified in the work of David Harvey, Ellen Wood, Peter Gowan, Callinicos himself and his late comrade Chris Harman continues to emphasise, as did Lenin and Bukharin, inter-state competition albeit with important differences from the period of Europe’s thirty year crisis from 1914 to 1945. Substantively, Callinicos attempts to defend a variant of Marxism which posits a ‘realist moment’ in international relations without succumbing, as he suggests Harvey does, to explanatory pluralism.
The remainder of the book, made up of essays mainly but not exclusively published in the Cambridge Review of international Affairs, is given over to contributions to a debate both on Callinicos’ thesis and to the broader concept of imperialism. First Benno Teschke and Hannes Lacher criticise Callinicos’ position from a perspective influenced by the ‘political Marxism’ of Bob Brenner and Ellen Wood. They argue that the national form taken by modern capitalism is not a consequence of the capitalist nature of modernity, but rather that it is a hangover from the fragmented absolutist state structure into which capitalism was born. By contrast, Kees van der Pijl, posits a deep structural relation between capital and world politics that underpins modern imperialism. He argues that humanity’s relationship with nature is structured through both a mode of production and a mode of foreign relations. More concretely, he traces the trajectory by which the English speaking world constituted itself at the ‘Lockean heartland’ at the core of modern capitalist civilisation, and how this preeminent position has come to be increasingly challenged in the modern transnational age. For his part, Bill Robinson provides a succinct summary of his more extreme version of this transnationalist perspective. He suggests that Hilferding et al’s analyses of the world in the early part of the last century were not wrong, but that they did tend to make unwarranted extrapolations from a historically specific moment in the history of capitalism to a general characteristic of the relationship of states to capital. Robinson argues, by contrast, that capitalism has gone through a series of phases, and that most recently the transitional phase of globalisation has undermined the assumptions upon which the classical Marxists based their theory of imperialism. It is from this perspective that he rejects the characterisation of his work as a form of neo-Kautskyism. If he nonetheless believes that imperialism is still with us, it is based upon the intensive and extensive expansion of capitalist social relations rather than inter-state competition.
Neil Davidson’s contribution to the debate is from the opposite perspective. Deriving from the same tradition as Callinicos – that is from an interpretation of Marx, Lenin, and Bukharin through a lens of the work of Mike Kidron, Tony Cliff and Chris Harman - Davidson argues that Callinicos’s attempt to marry a realist moment onto the Marxist analysis of capitalism marks a retreat from the insights of this tradition. In particular, Davidson develops Harman’s comments about non-market forms of competition as an alternative to the explanatory pluralism he suggests Callinicos effectively embraces. Alternatively, in his contribution to the one logic or two debate, Mark Rupert builds upon the arguments made by Justin Rosenberg and Ellen Wood on the way that capitalism gives rise to a necessary separation of economics and politics, which in turn underpins the possibility of contemporary forms of inter-state completion. From a neo-Gramscian perspective he attempts to root a conception of modern American imperialism in the transition from Fordist to post-Fordist production. He suggests that though American workers have lost out from this change, imperialism offers especially male workers an important source of ideological conciliation.
From a much more materialist position the late Peter Gowan, to whom the collection is dedicated, argues in an important essay that is a fitting tribute to his powerful contribution to our understanding of imperialism, for a conception of imperialism rooted in the structure of modern production. Building on a critique of the neoliberal conception of declining returns to scale, Gowan shows not only that this dogmatic assertion has little basis in fact but also that it acts as a cover for the way that free market policies actually achieve exactly that which they are supposed to prevent: the tendency to monopolisation. Once the reality of increasing returns to scale is recognised, monopoly is best understood not in opposition to the market but rather as its logical conclusion. From this perspective, inter-state competition is best understood as the form taken by competition between territorially rooted monopoly producers. By thus rooting the theory of imperialism in the structure of industrial production, Gowan points beyond both the ‘hopelessly thin’ liberal conception of imperialism and the dualism of Harvey’s and (arguably) Callinicos’s conceptions of capitalist exploitation and inter-state competition. He also suggests, contra modern day Proudhonists, that the key political choice facing humanity is that between the democratic, socialist, control over large scale production or the privatisation of this control: imperialism.
Gowan thus provides the basis of the kind of materialist yet non-reductionist Marxism demanded by John Hobson. Commenting on various Marxist approaches to the problem of imperialism, Hobson suggests that whereas the ‘two logics’ and ‘relative autonomy’ of the state approaches attempt to escape the reductionism of the ‘base-superstructure’ model, the problem with these approaches is that, or so he posits, the base-superstructure model is immanent to Marx’s dialectical method. While Hobson suggests this as a general failing of Marxism, I’d prefer to see it as a basis for criticising all too common rejections of a caricatured version of the base-superstructure metaphor.
In an explicit return to a somewhat under-utilised aspect of the classical Marxist debate on imperialism, Aneivas then reproduces an exchange between Callinicos and Justin Rosenberg on Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development. Deployed by these two as a mechanism to conceive the reproduction of inter-state rivalries long after the state system inherited from absolutism had been transformed by capitalism, Callinicos and Rosenberg focus on the historical co-ordinates of Trotsky’s concept. Rosenberg takes it as having a universal significance, while Callinicos prefers to conceive it primarily as a characteristic of capitalist society. This point is extended by Sam Ashman. She argues that Callinicos is right to conceive Trotsky’s concept as referring to historically specific, capitalist, social relations, and that Callinicos is also right to develop an account of inter-state competition from this perspective. Nevertheless, she departs from his claim that this leads to a realist moment in IR. By contrast, in their contribution Jamie Allinson and Alex Aneivas develop a critique of political Marxism while agreeing that Marx does accept a series of transhitorical categories, which combined and uneven development can be conceived alongside.
For his part, Adam Morton applies the concept of uneven and combined development to account for the specific structures of class rule that facilitated Italy’s passive revolution, and later similar social transformations. Finally, Simon Bromley stresses the importance of the moment of politics in international relations, and the necessity of a non-reductionist interpretation of this moment.
The essays collected in this book point to the power of contemporary Marxist contributions to such a project. That Marxists are involved in such a fruitful debate is evidence that, once against, war has forced us to re-conceive our conceptions of the world in order to fight its inhumane aspects. These are fundamental questions, to which, in my view, these essays make important contributions. The nature of imperialism is a key issue not only for Marxists, and this book is a must read for anyone interested in understanding and fighting against modern imperialism.
4 January 2011