The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism

Abstract

The appearance of systematic barriers to economic advance in the courseof capitalist expansion—the ‘development of underdevelopment’—hasposed difficult problems for Marxist theory. [*] There has arisen,in response, a strong tendency sharply to revise Marx’s conceptionsregarding economic development. In part, this has been a healthyreaction to the Marx of the Manifesto, who envisioned a more or lessdirect and inevitable process of capitalist expansion: underminingold modes of production, replacing them with capitalist social productiverelations and, on this basis, setting off a process of capital accumulationand economic development more or less following the pattern of theoriginal homelands of capitalism. In the famous phrases of the CommunistManifesto: ‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizingthe instruments of production and thereby the relations of production,and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of theold modes of production in an altered form was, on the contrary,the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes.Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbanceof all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty, and agitationdistinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. The bourgeoisie. . . draw all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization.The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery withwhich it batters down all Chinese walls . . . It compels all nations,on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production;it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into theirmidst, to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it creates a worldafter its own image.’Many writers have quite properly pointed out that historical developmentssince the mid-nineteenth century have tended to belie this ‘optimistic’,‘progressist’ prognosis, in that the capitalist penetration of the‘third world’ through trade and capital investment not only has failedto carry with it capitalist economic development, but has erectedpositive barriers to such development. Yet the question remains,where did Marx err? What was the theoretical basis for his incorrectexpectations? As can be seen from the above quotation and many othersfrom the same period, [1] Marx was at first quite confident thatcapitalist economic expansion, through trade and investment, wouldinevitably bring with it the transformation of pre-capitalist social-productiverelations—i.e. class relations—and the establishment of capitalistsocial-productive relations, a capitalist class structure. It wasclearly on the premise that capitalist expansion would lead to theestablishment of capitalist social relations of production on theruins of the old modes, that he could predict world-wide economicdevelopment in a capitalist image.But, suppose capitalist expansion through trade and investment failedto break the old modes of production (a possibility which Marx laterenvisaged [2]); or actually tended to strengthen the old modes, orto erect other non-capitalist systems of social relations of productionin place of the old modes? In this case, Marx’s prediction wouldfall to the ground. For whatever Marx thought about the origins ofcapitalist social-productive relations, he was quite clear that theirestablishment was indispensable for the development of the productiveforces, i.e. for capitalist economic development. If expansion throughtrade and investment did not bring with it the transition to capitalistsocial-productive relations—manifested in the full emergence of labourpower as a commodity—there could be no capital accumulation on anextended scale. In consequence, the analysis of capitalist economicdevelopment requires an understanding, in the first place, of themanner in which the capitalist social-productive relations underpinningthe accumulation of capital on an extended scale originated. In turn,it demands a comprehension of the way in which the various processesof capitalist expansion set off by the accumulation of capital broughtabout, or were accompanied by, alternatively: 1. the further erectionof capitalist class relations; 2. merely the interconnection of capitalistwith pre-capitalist forms, and indeed the strengthening of the latter;or 3. the transformation of pre-capitalist class relations, but withouttheir substitution by fully capitalist social-productive relationsof free wage labour, in which labour power is a commodity. In everycase, it is class relations which clearly become pivotal: the questionof their transformation in relationship to economic development.