Abstract
In his account of societies based on the Asiatic mode of production Marx asked, as we have seen, why they seem to have been typified by a failure to evolve historically. In contrast to the dynamic evolution of Western Europe, with its sequence on the classic lines described in the Manifesto and Capital — classical society, feudal society, and the modern bourgeois society that is the precursor of socialist society — he stresses the long-drawn stagnation of Asiatic societies, whose ‘stationary social conditions’1 he sees as a direct result of a mode of production that is incapable of autonomous development. It is no accident that, despite his dislike of capitalists and colonisers, he looked to their conquests to bring about the destruction of the Asiatic mode of production and thereby provide the external impulse for breaking out of this gigantic. historical impasse, with consequences affecting the whole history of the world:
England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England, she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.2
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Notes
Lefebvre has rightly pointed out that ‘the word “modern” is repeatedly used by Marx to describe the rise of the bourgeoisie, economic growth and the establishment of capitalism, as well as their political manifestations; finally, and above all, he uses it to describe the critique of all that sequence of historical events’. (Henri Lefebvre, Introduction à la modernité, Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1962, p. 170
See for instance Talcott Parsons, Structure in Modern Societies, Free Press of Glencoe, New York, 1959
Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society, Free Press of Glencoe, New York, 1958
S. N. Eisenstadt, Modernization, Protest and Change, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966.
Cf. in particular Karl Marx, letter to Friedrich Engels, 17 July 1854, in Werke, vol. XXVIII, pp. 382–4; Eng. trans. in Selected Correspondence, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1955, pp. 105–8, in which Marx notes that ‘the term capitalia appears for the first time in connection with the communes’. That does not mean that Marx ignored the influence in its turn of the Protestant ethic on the capitalist spirit, a discovery which is usually attributed to Max Weber: ‘The cult of money has its asceticism, its self-denial, its self-sacrifice — economy and frugality, contempt for mundane, temporal and fleeting pleasures; the chase after the eternal treasure. Hence the connection between English Puritanism, or also Dutch Protestantism, and money-making.’ (Marx, Grundrisse, p. 143; Eng. trans. p. 232.) Marx is not the only one to be ahead of his time in giving that explanation in place of the usual one for the formation of the capitalist ethos. Pirenne, for instance, writes in his description of a typical eleventh-century merchant: ‘The quest of profit guided all his actions and in him can easily be recognized that famous capitalist spirit (spiritus capitalisticus) which some would have us date only from the Renaissance.’ (Henri Pirenne, Les villes du moyen âge, Lamartin, Brussels, 1927; Eng. trans. Medieval Cities, Anchor Books, New York, 1965, p. 83). Similarly, Mumford puts forward the view that ‘Capitalist enterprise burgeoned after the Crusades, beginning at the end of the eleventh century’ and, he writes, this change from an economy of mutual protection to one of unilateral capitalist exploitation did not await, as Max Weber has unfortunately led many people to believe, the rise of sixteenth-century Protestantism, for Protestantism itself, on the contrary, had begun in the thirteenth century with the Waldensians... as a Christian protest against the new practices of capitalism. The capitalist economy was already well over the horizon when Chaucer wrote his wistful encomium on “The Former Age” when “ther lay no profit, ther was no richesse”. By providing a nest in which the cuckoo bird of capitalism could lay her eggs, the walled town soon made it possible for her offspring to be crowded out by the boisterous newcomer it harboured.’ (Mumford, The City in History, pp. 256–7.) Even Sweezy has recently written: ‘... it seems to me unlikely that anyone would disagree that both the decline of feudalism and the beginnings of capitalism can be traced far back into the Middle Ages, that is, into a period when there is no doubt that the dominant European mode of production was feudal.’ (Paul M. Sweezy, ‘The Transition to Socialism’, in Monthly Review (New York), vol. XXIII, no. 1 (May 1971) p. 2.)
Marx and Engels, Die Deutsche Ideologie, p. 36; Eng. trans. p. 57. Althusser’s strange assertion seems in the light of the above to be totally untenable; he maintains that ‘The concept of “civil society” — the world of individual economic behaviour and its ideological origins — disappears from Marx’s work’ (Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1969, p. 110.)
Gramsci of course defined civil society as ‘all the organisations which are commonly called “private”’. (Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince and Other Writings, trans. Lois Marks, (New World Paperbacks, New York, 1957, p. 124
Norberto Bobbio, ‘Gramsci e la concezione delia società civile’, in a collection of writings Gramsci e la cultura contemporanea, ed. Pietro Rossi, Editori Riuniti, Rome, 1969, vol. I, pp. 75–100
Gerschenkron, writing about ‘the ideal spirit of the towns in Western Europe as it had developed there long centuries before Luther or Calvin began to reform the Church’, openly took issue with Max Weber’s familiar views in the following words: ‘It is easy to be confused by the multiplicity of contradictory traits evinced by the medieval cities and by the baffling regional variations. Still, when everything is said and done, their contribution, and particularly the contribution of the craft guilds, to modern industrial development must not be underestimated. They, for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire, introduced a basic division of labour, by paring out industrial activities from the mass of agricultural production in which they had been embedded. By acquiring power and independence, the cities for the first time gave to industrial pursuits an aura of respectability, if we abstract from the mystery-surrounded figure of the village blacksmith. The craft guilds through their regulations and practice instilled into their members some incipient instinct of workmanship and at the same time tended to establish some basic precepts of commercial honesty.... Max Weber could not ignore the case of the craft guilds altogether, and he referred to it, although not in his Protestant Ethic, but at the end of an article which he published one year later.... The admission that the craft guilds nurtured bourgeois “ethical standards” and “bourgeois rationalism” is much more damaging to Weber’s thesis than appears from the passage.... The development of “the capitalist spirit (if we have to use the term) is a century-long and very complex historical process and... Weber at least should have asked the question as to how much of the spirit of craft and guilds was absorbed in the Protestant ethic and how greatly its formation thereby facilitated.... It is true, of course, that the craft guilds — once the harbinger and the vehicle of the new — in due course became an obstacle to industrial progress, seeking to subject modern enterprises to regulations and restrictions that were designed to stifle their growth. But it would be unhistorical to allow phenomena and events of a later period to merge with and blur those of an earlier period.... In the course of historical processes a given relation between the phenomena may not merely change, but change to its opposite.... The role of the craft guilds in industrial history is an excellent case in point.” (Alexander Gerschenkron, Europe in the Russian Mirror, Cambridge Univ. Press, London, 1970, pp. 56–61
Pirenne also draws attention to ‘the striking correspondence which is to be noted between the expansion of trade and the revival of cities. Italy and the Netherlands, where commerce first showed itself, are precisely the countries where cities made their first appearance and where they developed most rapidly and vigorously’. (Pirenne, op. cit., p. 95.) However, he seems to consider that ‘the growth of these cities is directly related, as an effect to its cause, to the commercial revival’ of the late Middle Ages, and not the other way round. Pirenne has been taken to task by Mumford on that point: ‘The revival of trade is often taken, even by excellent scholars like Pirenne, as the direct cause of the city-building and civilising activities that took place in the eleventh century. But before this could happen a surplus of rural products and a surplus of population were necessary, to provide both goods for trade and customers to purchase them.... The truth, then, lies in just the opposite interpretation to Pirenne’s: it was the revival of the protected town that helped the reopening of the regional and international trade routes, and led to the trans-European circulation of surplus commodities.’ (Mumford, The City in History, pp. 253–5.) Marx, as we have seen, is in true dialectical fashion totally divorced from such a logic of cause and effect; but his interpretation seems to this author to be closer on the whole to Mumford’s than to the apparently more ‘materialist’ views of Pirenne, who — as one critic has rightly observed — reportedly took the materialist view of history’ sans avoir lu une ligne de Marx’. (J. Dhondt, ‘Henri Pirenne: historien des institutions urbaines’, in Annali della Fondazione Italiana per la Storia Amministriva, vol. III, no. 1 (1966), p. 127
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Melotti, U. (1977). The Origins of Capitalism. In: Marx and the Third World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15801-0_17
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