 |
||||
|
||||
|
Socialist Outlook : SO/13 - Autumn 2007
Review‘Symposium: ‘Ernest Mandel and the Historical Theory of Global Capitalism’Historical Materialism volume 15 issue 1 Spring 2007
Since his death in 1995 Ernest Mandel’s theoretical work has been surprisingly little discussed on the Marxist left, with the exception of one conference volume edited by Gilbert Achcar. [1] This is a major loss, since as well as acting as a leading activist for half a century in the Fourth International, Mandel made significant contributions to Marxist analysis in a large number of areas. Indeed, he saw his theoretical and practical activities as inseparable. So the decision by Historical Materialism to publish the papers from a symposium on Mandel’s work held in Amsterdam in 2003 is very welcome. It was organised jointly by the Free University of Brussels, the Ernest Mandel Foundation and the International Institute of Social History and as published consists of five papers preceded by an editorial introduction. [2] In their introduction Marcel van der Linden and Jan Willem Stutje consider a key element of Mandel’s methodological approach, as expressed in the first chapter of Late Capitalism. This is the criticism of previous classical Marxists, for example Rudolf Hilferding, Rosa Luxemburg and Henryk Grossman, for two failings of method. Firstly, Mandel argued that such writers misunderstood the purpose of the reproduction schemas outlined by Marx in volume 2 of Capital by taking them to be a direct description of capitalist development rather than a hypothetical model of the conditions that would have to exist for capitalism to attain stability (here Mandel was heavily influenced by the work of his friend Roman Rosdolsky). Secondly, the classical Marxists tended to try to deduce the dynamic of capitalism from a single factor, embedded in the schemas. In contrast Mandel argued that this dynamic depended on the interaction between several partially independent variables (in Late Capitalism six are considered) with the rate of profit acting as an indicator (a ‘seismograph’) of the underlying movements in these factors. Van der Linden and Stutje question whether Mandel’s approach provides a satisfactory basis for the analysis of capitalism. They query the extent to which it is possible to do justice to the complexity of the interactions highlighted by Mandel, without either slipping back into an overly determinist framework or simply providing a number of individual analyses of aspects of the system without a clear unifying standpoint. This is certainly a crucial issue in assessing Mandel’s work and a symposium that explored this issue thoroughly would make a real contribution not just to understanding Mandel but to Marxism generally. However, the symposium here does not really take up the issue posed by van der Linden and Stutje as centrally as it might. The main reason for this is that the question of Mandel’s method is somewhat sidelined here by a rather different question; that of the links between theory and history, both in Mandel’s work and more generally. Now, there is no doubt that Mandel was exceptionally well-informed historically and an important strength of his Marxism was the way in which he set theoretical questions in their historical context. As is pointed out this was important in his critique of Althusser’s structuralist approach to Marx and it also ensured that Mandel was very clear about the limitations of the critiques of Marxian economics influenced by the work of Piero Sraffa. However, Mandel was not primarily a historian and surely the central theoretical contribution which he made from the mid-1960s onwards, heavily influenced by immediate political and economic events, was to the explication of the forces shaping contemporary capitalism – informed by historical understanding but viewed from the standpoint of the present. Consequently, the focus on history here has the effect of shifting discussion, in my view, away from the central issues raised by Mandel’s work towards interesting but somewhat subsidiary questions. In particular, this focus means that quite a lot of the discussion here concentrates on the historical chapters of Mandel’s book Marxist Economic Theory. As is stressed by contributors, these are in many ways a model of the application of Marxism to historical explanation. But it should also be remembered that this book was first published (in French) in 1962 and resulted from work done through the 1950s. It is a synoptic overview of many aspects of Marxist theory, carried out (like the contemporary work of writers like Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezy) as part of the process of reclaiming and preserving Marxist ideas in the difficult period of the Cold War and the post-war boom. It was written before the explosion of Marxist historical work in the 1960s and 1970s. It is not clear that a work like this can bear the burden of the detailed evaluation of historical arguments in the way that contributors here sometimes appear to think. The emphasis on historical issues also tends to make the symposium rather more diffuse than is promised by the introduction so that to some extent the various papers relate to one another only loosely. However, having said this, they do raise a number of fascinating questions which suggest many fruitful areas for further discussion. The first paper, by the Indian revolutionary Jairus Banaji, deals with the origin of capitalism. Banaji argues both that capitalism developed much earlier than most Marxists have believed, first through the Arab trading empires from the ninth century onwards and then through the maritime expansion of Venice, Genoa and Portugal, after the ‘fourth crusade’. He argues that the reason these large swathes of capitalist development have been substantially ignored by Marxists, is that they were based on commercial capital, and Marxists (unlike Marx himself) have tended to operate with an unduly limited concept of commercial capital and a restrictive polarisation between commercial and productive capital. This argument has clear implications, not followed through in detail by Banaji, for the debates between writers like Robert Brenner and Ellen Wood on the one hand, and ‘world-systems theorists’ like Immanuel Wallerstein on the other, about capitalist development. The second article, by Patrick O’Brien, takes up some of the same issues. O’Brien argues that the commercial networks highlighted by Banaji, in particular the plunder of the Americas by Spain, Portugal, Holland and Britain, had less significance than Mandel believed. He does not claim that the flow of gold and silver was of no importance – it allowed for the input of some key commodities, notably, porcelain, silks and textiles, and financed the integration of trade and consequent market growth. However, O’Brien claims that the impact of monetary flows in founding capital accumulation was secondary to internal developments within Northern Europe. Unfortunately though, O’Brien then goes on to leap from the claim that imperialist exploitation was secondary to internal factors in both the founding and later development of capitalism to the much broader and highly disputable view that Marxist accounts of capital formation and surplus extraction cannot explain economic growth at all and are inferior to the analyses put forward by liberal economists such as Joel Mokyr and Deepak Lal. Neither of these papers, especially the one by Banaji, really discusses Mandel’s work in depth. This is rectified in the third paper by Michael Krätke which provides a more substantial analysis of Late Capitalism in the context of Marxist theory. Krätke makes three specific criticisms and one general criticism of Mandel. The first specific argument is that, despite his criticism of Luxemburg and others for their use of the reproduction schemas, Mandel goes on to use them in a very similar way, and consequently does not decisively break from the method of classical Marxism. In addition, he does not really integrate his partially independent variables together into a coherent ‘synthetic’ account that can explain the overall course of late capitalism. Secondly, Krätke claims that Mandel did not fully follow through the logic of his discussion of the law of value on an international level, and in particular that he did not draw out the implications of his theory for Marx’s analysis both of competition and of the falling rate of profit. Thirdly, Krätke argues that Mandel’s use of the theory of ‘long waves’ of capitalist expansion and recession is not convincingly linked with his account of partially independent variables and so opens up more questions about the links between history and theory than it answers. More generally, Krätke believes that Mandel did not manage to show exactly what is specific about late capitalism as a distinct historical period, as compared, for example, to monopoly capitalism in general. However, he does point out advantages in Mandel’s approach to this question compared to rival theories, notably the regulation school of Michel Aglietta and his followers. Combined and uneven developmentMarcel van der Linden’ paper deals with the theory of combined and uneven development. He traces through various formulations of the theory, starting with Trotsky, George Novack and Mandel and then moves to various Dutch writers, notably Jan Romein. Critical analysis of the approach is confined to just two pages at the end of the article, where he argues, following Cliff Slaughter, that one cannot speak of a ‘law’ of combined and uneven development because there is no basis for the kinds of determinate predictions about historical development which are required for assigning that kind of status to the theory. This seems both in large measure simply to be a semantic question and also to depend on defining the concept of a law in a remarkably restrictive way, based on the natural sciences. Finally, Jan Willem Stutje provides an account of the development of Mandel’s thought, largely based on his archived correspondence. In particular Stutje is concerned with the changes in Mandel’s ideas during the 1960s and early 1970s, from the publication of Marxist Economic Theory to the writing of Late Capitalism. The importance of the dialogue between Mandel and Rosdolsky comes through clearly as does the key role played by Mandel’s writing in the development of the New Left in West Germany. Stutje is about to publish (in Dutch) a biography of Mandel and his article whets the appetite for this book. However, it contains little critical discussion of Mandel’s ideas. Again, the points are made that Mandel did not integrate the various aspects of late capitalism together coherently, and that he did not fully differentiate late capitalism from monopoly capitalism. But these claims are not fully argued for and Stutje appears to regard the concept of Fordism (adopted by Aglietta following Gramsci) as superior to that of late capitalism that indicates an unexplored difference between his approach and that of Krätke. To a large degree these various contributions raise more questions than they answer. One notable absence struck me while reading them. The authors place great emphasis on Mandel’s view that capitalist accumulation is fundamentally dependent on the exploitation of non-capitalist sectors and relies on the continued existence of such sectors. In the symposium, and in much of Mandel’s work, this is seen in the context of imperialism and unequal exchange with developing economies. Yet, later Marxists, influenced by feminist and green ideas, would surely see the exploitation of reproductive labour and of the natural world as equally significant in this context. This shows both the power of Mandel’s thinking as his ideas can be applied to different areas and also raises the possibility that his concepts can be deepened and enriched. More generally, while the contributions here are stimulating and enjoyable to read, their main effect is to remind the reader what a remarkable and exciting writer Mandel was. As the introduction says, Mandel’s work resists the kind of neat formulation seen as central to success in academic economics. Yet this is the converse of what makes him worth reading; a torrent of ideas related to a wealth of historical and contemporary data – fused together by the fire of political commitment.
NOTES [1] G Achcar (ed) (1999) The Legacy of Ernest Mandel, Verso [2] This issue also contains other interesting material, including a review by Alan Thornett of a recent book by Ralph Darlington and Dave Lyddon about the class struggle in 1972 in Britain. |
|
||
Andy Kilmister is Senior Lecturer in Economics at Oxford Brookes University, where he researches industrial restructuring and structural change in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989. Andy is a member of the International Socialist Group and of the editorial collective of the journal Labour Focus on Eastern Europe. He is co-author of ’Critical and Post-Critical Political Economy’.