By JOSÉ RICARDO FIGUEIREDO*
The genesis of capitalism has to do with the expansion of the world market and colonial relations, but none of this characterizes the capitalist mode of production.
Responding to Mário Maestri's criticisms, expressed in the articles “The colonization of America in debate” and “In search of a lost feudal Brazil”, posted on the website the earth is round, Ronald León Núñez presents, in the article “About the dynamics of European colonization”, posted on the same website his perspective on the colonization of the Americas, in the line of Trotskyist theorists Nahuel Moreno and George Novack. This gives a wide audience the opportunity to learn about your arguments in the synthetic form of an article.
Núñez defines our colonization process as “essentially capitalist”. Initially, he distinguishes himself from dependency theorists, such as André Gunder Frank, who characterize colonization simply as “capitalist”. For Núñez, this conception committed the “basic error” of “confusing mercantile economy with a capitalist mode of production”, “ignored the problem of production relations” and “distorted the concept of capitalism”. Thus, Núñez would distinguish himself from those theorists by recognizing the Marxist concept of production relations. But why would this concept be a “problem”?
Núñez begins by quoting Moreno, according to whom “Colonization has capitalist objectives, to make a profit, but it is combined with non-capitalist relations of production”. This formulation is strictly true, but requires two caveats.
Without a doubt, colonization had capitalist objectives on the part of commercial capital, including the slave trade. Abstracting the social and cultural aspects, and focusing on their objective of valuing capital, one can extend the adjective capitalist to the sesmeiros who invested their assets in the acquisition of slaves and, in the case of the sugar mill, also in the mill's expensive installations and in the salary of specialized employees.
But not all colonization actors sought profits from capital. Colonization implied territorial expansion; new lands were granted to nobles, usually in recognition of military feats. These grantees were entitled to land rent, not capitalist profit corresponding to invested capital.
In order to attract the indigenous people, the Catholic clergy, Jesuits and several other religious orders were fundamental, whose objective was ideological, religious, but whose survival also depended on income, not profit.
Finally, even when the sesmeiros had initially invested capital, once the enterprise was formed, they and their heirs would live as rentiers, as maintenance costs were, in general, low, especially because the slave herd partially reproduced itself.
However, the central theme of Moreno's phrase is the combination between capitalist objectives and non-capitalist production relations. With the above caveat, this combination existed. The question that arises is which aspect should be used to characterize the process of construction of colonial society: the capitalist objectives of some of its participants or the relations of production.
Commenting on Moreno's assertion, Núñez adds a historical argument about the colonization process: “this European enterprise, despite appealing to an unequal combination of different production relations, with a predominance of pre-capitalist ones, had a historical meaning dictated by general trends of the primitive accumulation of capital in Europe.”
What is seen as “historical meaning” are the future consequences of mercantile development and colonization, which will fertilize the emergence of capitalism in European conditions. The expression is acceptable in this sense of recognition of the consequences of modern mercantile development. Another thing is to define colonial society in America by its “historical sense”, by what will happen in the future, elsewhere. This is an explicit anachronism!
Mário Maestri is absolutely right to denote the teleological character of Núñez's anachronistic argument. Human consciences and actions are based on the conditions of his time; Even when thinking about the future, we start from the conditions and contradictions of the present, to deny or maintain them. Therefore, the expression “historical sense”, as used by Núñez, sounds as if something above human consciousness and actions commanded historical development towards some purpose. Since Núñez does not resort to any divine or diabolical intervention, this historical command must have been given by the much-reiterated objective of profit, as if this had manifested itself in mercantilism and reached, by itself, its full realization in capitalism.
Thus, Núñez recognizes the distinction between mercantile capital and capitalism, as a capitalist mode of production, but identifies mercantilism with capitalism through its “historical meaning”. He formally recognizes the Marxist conceptualization, but his teleological anachronism leads him to the same theoretical result as André Gunder Frank, “essentially”.
In fact, historiography describes the medieval European world, then the discoveries and mercantilism in the modern period, and then the birth of industrial capitalism in the contemporary period. Every historian of these eras naturally tends to look for relationships between eras. Núñez and Frank are part of a very common tendency to see mercantilism as a period of transition from feudalism to capitalism, as an anteroom to capitalism that already contained its essence.
The teleology follows:
“The central idea is that the dynamics of Iberian colonialism, beyond the archaic forms present in the structure and superstructure of colonized spaces, were intrinsically linked to the expansion of the world market dominated by commercial capital which, ultimately, would create the conditions for the hegemony of the capitalist mode of production.”
Thus, “beyond” concrete structural and superstructural relations, that is, daily life and its objective contradictions in the Colony, what would matter, for Núñez, were relations with the world market and the genesis of the future capitalist mode of production. We see how Núñez solves the “problem of production relations”: he recognizes the concept, but what he considers relevant is what is “beyond” it. More of the same in this other passage:
“The bottom line of the matter is understanding what the objective of colonial production was – what it was organized for – and drawing all conclusions, whether the order regime or the enslavement of indigenous people and Africans, among other non-capitalist forms of labor exploitation, whether or not they were subordinated to the process of primitive accumulation of capital controlled by the metropolises.”
No. Colonization was subordinated to the process of extracting surplus value from colonial society by the metropolis, involving merchant capital, but also the Crown, the nobility and the clergy. The conditions of some European countries, Holland initially, then England, then others, allowed the use of part of this surplus value as primitive accumulation for the nascent capitalist mode of production in those countries. To say that colonization was subordinated to the process of primitive accumulation is to repeat teleology; Those who trafficked Africans, looked for noble metals or built mills thought about accumulating for themselves and theirs, not for a future mode of production.
Regarding this abstraction of concrete conditions in favor of what is “beyond”, says Núñez in response to Maestri: “The problem is not in considering 'the concrete', but in trying to transform the part into a totality, attributing to it (…) 'a fundamental determination'.” Núñez clings to this philosophical category, totality. “In this historical context, the needs of this 'expanding international market' (…) will be the totality that will condition the constituent elements of our societies”.
He argues that the “totality conditions the parts, and not the other way around”. It is a reckless postulate. It is valid, for example, when someone dies after a process of general deterioration in their health, until a vital organ is affected, but not when someone dies due to the failure of a vital organ, in a generally healthy body; in this case the part will have conditioned the whole.
Due to the family relationships of the Iberian nobility, Portugal lost its autonomy to Spain after the death of D. Sebastião in Alcácer-Quibir. The Netherlands, a pioneer in the development of manufacturing capitalism, an ally of Portugal but an enemy of Spain, lost its access to the Brazilian sugar market. At this time, the world market was conditioned by a particularity of the feudal conception of the Iberian monarchies. The Netherlands began to explore sugar in the Antilles, but also decided to recover the Brazilian market by invading the Northeast. At this time, the world market directly affected Brazilian colonial society, “beyond” local economic relations.
In this line of totality, Núñez criticizes “modoproductivists”, like Maestri, who “fixes his gaze on a tree, certainly a leafy one, and loses sight of the forest”.
It turns out that the entirety of Núñez is partial. The conditioning totality of colonial society included the mercantile class of the metropolis, but it also included its nobility, its clergy, its disinherited. It included, on the other hand, the type of social organization of the American tribes, their suitability or not for one or another economic activity. It also included the existence of a slave market in Africa. Therefore, the role of commercial development in the modern period in the genesis of European capitalism does not give it the character of “totality” or absolute determination.
When focusing on sugar or cattle production in the Colony, the totality under consideration includes master and slave, or master and pawn. When considering this production as capitalist due to the profit interest obtained by the master through participation in the world market, Núñez ignores the direct producer and takes, as an absolute criterion, the interest and practice of whoever appropriates the surplus value. Ultimately, he forgets the social totality in favor of a pole of its fundamental contradiction. The opposite of the concept of mode of production, which is based on the relationships between the poles, producer and owner.
In all his defense of the capitalist characterization, Núñez formally ignores, and effectively denies, the categorical answer that Marx gives to this question, valuing the modes of production. I summarize here well-known paragraphs, which I cited in the article “In search of the concept of mode of production”, in this magazine. In the Preface of Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx states that the totality of production relations “constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which a legal and political edifice is built, and to which certain forms of social consciousness correspond”. Based on this concept, he typifies “Asian, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois regimes” as “progressive epochs” of human development. When dealing with forms of pre-capitalist land rent in The capital, Marx observes that “the most hidden secret, the hidden basis of all social construction” is in the “direct relationship existing between the owners of the means of production and the direct producers”. In the sequences of both paragraphs, production relations are historically linked to the stage of development of productive forces, that is, to the mode of production in the technical aspect. Marx was an incorrigible “modoproductivist”.
But Núñez defends his position also citing Engels and Marx. At the beginning we read:
“For the Manifesto, the capitalist world market and colonial exploitation constituted 'the revolutionary element of the decomposing feudal society', paving the way – taking the form of 'extermination, enslavement and subjugation of the native population in the mines' – for the hegemony of the of production in Europe.”
Yes, the genesis of capitalism has to do with the expansion of the world market and colonial relations involving enslavement and subjugation of the native population, but none of this characterizes the capitalist mode of production.
In two paragraphs by Marx, relating to modern commercial slavery, there is recognition of a capitalist aspect in commercial slavery. From the Value Theories, quotes Núñez:
“In the second type of colonies – the large farms (plantations) – destined from the beginning to commercial speculation and with production aimed at the world market, there is capitalist production, although only formally, since black slavery excludes free wage earners, therefore the foundation of capitalist production. But those who carry out the slave trade are capitalists. The mode of production they introduce does not come from slavery, but is grafted onto it. In this case, capitalist and land owner are the same person.”
Therefore, commercial slave production would be “formally only” capitalist, because “the foundation of capitalist production”, “the free wage worker”, was excluded. The centrality of production relations is clearly reaffirmed. The term “formally” possibly refers to the form of realizing surplus value as capital appreciation.
But Núñez sees in Marx what he wants to see. He concludes from that sentence that Marx “affirms that the production system is not 'slavery', but that slavery is 'grafted' onto a broader whole”.
Now, at no point does Marx say that the production system is not slave-based, nor does he say that slavery is grafted anywhere. He does say that “the mode of production they introduce does not come from slavery, but is grafted onto it”, that is, it is grafted onto slavery. Marx certainly refers to the mode of production in the technical sense of the expression; Obtaining sugar from sugarcane, for example, involved a medieval European technique, that is, it was a mode of production that came from feudalism and was grafted onto slavery. For Marx, attentive to the historical relationship between production relations and the stage of development of productive forces, this type of “grafting” of a technical mode of production between different production relations would certainly attract attention.
Two floorplans, quotes Núñez:
“Whether we now not only call plantation owners in America capitalists, but whether they in fact are, is based on the fact that they exist as an anomaly within a world market founded on free labor.”
Here, capitalist terminology and practices, as they are dominant in the world market, would be transferred to anomalous modes. But this capitalist character comes after a conditional “if”.
But from this paragraph, Núñez concludes: “it is clear that he (Marx) does not conceive of modern slavery as something in itself, but as an anomalous part of a general movement of transition to capitalism”. Again, Núñez reads in Marx what he would like to read. First, Marx's phrase does not deal with any general transition movement, but with just one moment, contemporary to what Marx was writing, in which the dominant capitalist mode of production in the world market coexisted with slavery. Second, Marx specifically addresses slavery “in itself,” both ancient and modern, in other passages. In the article “The historical formation of Brazil under debate”, I transcribe paragraphs from Marx comparing slavery in the South of the USA with wage labor in the North; the comparison does not present them as parts of some general transitional movement, but as antagonistic labor relations.
Os floorplans e Surplus Value Theories are economic manuscripts dated between 1857 and 1863, which were published posthumously. Regarding both quotes from Marx repeated above, an observation from Prof. João Quartim de Moraes: there is an ontological difference between the works that an author decided to publish during his lifetime and those that he did not publish. Regardless, the capitalist designation of production or owner appears in both quotes accompanied by ellipses, while the centrality of the mode of production is reaffirmed, in both cases, in different ways.
It is worth bringing to the debate paragraphs from the chapter “Historical considerations on commercial capital” by The capital, in which Marx deals with the topic in detail and specifically. The first paragraph expresses a general consideration:
“The development of trade and commercial capital drives production towards exchange value everywhere, increases its volume, diversifies and cosmopolitanizes it, develops money, making it world money. Commerce therefore acts everywhere as a solvent for pre-existing organizations of production, which, in all their different forms, are mainly focused on use value. To what extent, however, it causes the dissolution of the old mode of production depends, initially, on its solidity and internal articulation. And where this process of dissolution leads, that is, what new mode of production takes the place of the old, depends not on trade, but on the character of the old mode of production.”
Núñez's text is very reminiscent of the first part of this paragraph, but completely ignores the final part, in which Marx reiterates his “productivism mode”.
Exemplifying his formulation, Marx initially focuses on the development of the mode of production, in the technical sense, in Antiquity:
“Ancient Rome, already in the late republican period, developed commercial capital to a higher degree than it had ever reached before in the ancient world without any progress in the development of crafts; while in Corinth and other Greek cities of Europe and Asia Minor a developed handicraft accompanies the development of commerce.”
Finally, a paragraph in which Marx refers specifically to modern mercantilism:
“There is no doubt – and precisely this fact generated completely false conceptions – that, in the 16th and 17th centuries, the great revolutions that took place in commerce with geographic discoveries, and which quickly increased the development of commercial capital, constituted a main moment in promoting the transition from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production (…). However, the capitalist mode of production developed in its first period, the manufacturing period, only where the conditions for this had been generated during the Middle Ages. Compare, for example, the Netherlands with Portugal.”
We then have Marx's opinion on theories that very directly and lightly link mercantilism to capitalism: they are “completely false conceptions”.
*Jose Ricardo Figueiredo He is a retired professor at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Unicamp. Author of Ways of seeing production in Brazil (Associated Authors\EDUC). [https://amzn.to/40FsVgH]
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