Giovanni Arrighi made a remarkably broad-ranging and original contribution to comparative political economy and historical sociology over five decades. His last book shares these qualities. But Adam Smith in Beijing is unfortunately not mainly about the origins and dynamics of Chinese capitalism over the past three decades. It presents Adam Smith not as the apostle of free-market capitalism, but rather of a ‘non-capitalist market society’; and it uses this to make the case that since China’s economic development takes place outside (...) the European/North American capitalist ‘core’, it must, almost by definition, not be capitalist. Markets are conceived here as the instruments of states, yet the theory of the state advanced is severely undeveloped. Arrighi’s argument that China’s economic development is part and parcel of the demise of the US project for establishing itself as the ‘world state’ misinterprets the nature of the US empire as well as misses the extent of China’s integration with US-led capitalist globalisation. (shrink)

InHow the West Came to Rule, Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu offer an alternative to both Political Marxism and world-systems analysis by going beyond the nation-state as the unit of analysis in the former and the marginalisation of articulation and combination between modes of production in the latter. Their account also gives more room to non-European actors neglected in other interpretations of the rise of the West. However, I argue that their argument is much closer toWSAand that their critique of (...) Wallerstein regarding Eurocentrism, the origins of capitalism and the role of wage labour in the capitalist world-system is problematic. Furthermore, Anievas and Nişancıoğlu do not offer a sufficiently rigorous definition of combination, leading to an overextension of the concept. (shrink)

The canonical version of the ‘bourgeois revolutions’ has been under attack from both pro-capitalist ‘Revisionist’ historians and ‘Political Marxists’. Neil Davidson’s book How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? provides a thorough review of the intellectual history of the notion of the bourgeois revolution and attempts to rescue the concept from varied criticism. Despite distancing himself from problematic formulations of the bourgeois revolution inherited from Second-International Marxism, Davidson’s own framework reproduces many of the historical and conceptual problems of this tradition.

Viewing the development of French trade and manufacturing between 1650 and 1820, Jeff Horn underscores their great success based largely on overseas markets. His evidence supports the view of Friedrich Engels and Perry Anderson that capitalism developed within the pores of the Old Regime. Yet Horn attempts to deny the leading role of the bourgeoisie in this advance. He claims that it was through the Old Regime system of economic privileges rather than the agency of bourgeois capital accumulation that such (...) progress was made. This article rejects Horn’s exclusive preoccupation with the positive economic role of the privileges granted by the state. It reasserts the importance of the agency of the bourgeoisie in furthering economic development. Moreover, it contends that for all the economic gains made by the system of state privileges, such privileges were more than offset by the weight of rents on the peasantry and to the benefit of the nobility and Church imposed by this same regime of privileges. The distorted development that privileges imposed on economic and social life became an important factor behind the outbreak of the Revolution. (shrink)

Marxism has often been associated with two different legacies. The first rests on a strong exposition and critique of the logic of capitalism, grounded in a systematic analysis of the laws of motion of capitalism as a system. The second legacy refers to a strong historicist perspective grounded in a conception of social relations that emphasises the centrality of power and social conflict to the analysis of history. This article challenges the prominence of structural accounts of capitalism by showing how (...) the tension between these legacies has played out within Political Marxism, both orientations already having co-existed, somewhat uneasily, within Robert Brenner’s original contributions to the Transition Debate. Through this internal critique and re-formulation of Political Marxism, we wish to open a broader debate within Marxism on the need for a more agency-based account of capitalism, which builds more explicitly on the concept of social relations, to recover the historicist legacy of Marxism. (shrink)

Ralph Kingston, inBureaucrats and Bourgeois Society, argues that government employees constituted the core of the French bourgeoisie in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book lends support to the Marxist interpretation of the Revolution, not as a breakthrough of a capitalist bourgeoisie, but as a conflict originating in a social structure whose economic surplus was appropriated politically. This review posits that the peasants’ subsistence strategies constrained the economic evolution of the country and led well-to-do families to invest in shares of (...) governmental authority and careers in the civil service rather than in private enterprises. The slow economic growth and pursuit of state offices represent underlying continuities between the Old Regime and the nineteenth century. The notable changes resulted from the popular uprisings of 1789–93 and the rationalisation of the state apparatus during the revolutionary decade. (shrink)

Yıldız Atasoy’s recent survey of state transformation in Turkey reiterates some of the most typical shortcomings of Marxian approaches to the Ottoman/Turkish modernisation. This involves an ahistorical conception of capitalism reduced to commercial expansion and a structuralist method that transhistoricises the historical differentiation of the economic from the political. Combined together in Atasoy’s book, capitalism no longer exists in the shape of specific social relations and particular juridical/political forms, but rather it precedes and determines them. Consequently, social struggles over production (...) and reproduction are separated from and no longer implicated within struggles over the redefinition of citizenship, secularism and democracy. An implicit economic determinism eventually prevails, reproducing functionalist modes of argumentation. Based on a theoretical and historical critique of Atasoy’s argument, this review seeks to provide new insights into Ottoman/Turkish modernity from a Political Marxist perspective. (shrink)

This article is a response to some of the criticisms made of How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions? by Gerstenberger, Post and Riley. In particular, it focuses on two issues of definition – that of capitalism and the capitalist nation-state – which arise from the book’s ‘consequentialist’ claim that bourgeois revolutions are defined by a particular outcome: the establishment of nation-states dedicated to the accumulation of capital.

Beginning with Engels, Marxist historiography viewed the absolute monarchy in France as mediating between the nobility and the emergent capitalist bourgeoisie. More recent Marxist accounts stress that the absolute monarchy reflected the interests of the nobility. Revisionist Marxist historians have taken this perspective to an extreme arguing that, at the height of the Bourbon monarchy in the seventeenth century, a capitalist bourgeoisie did not exist. This paper argues that, in taking such a view, these historians have ignored the ongoing dialectical (...) opposition between the forces of rent and profit in the early-modern period. As a result, they have severed the connection between the ancien régime and the Revolution of 1789. Despite being thrown on the defensive by the advance of rent and the crystallisation of the absolutist state, a capitalist bourgeoisie that emerged in sixteenth-century France survived and persevered during the seventeenth century. It resumed the initiative in the succeeding period of the Enlightenment. (shrink)

This article seeks to reinterpret the process of state and class formation in “peripheral” societies—notably Syria—through a contextualized reading of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire influenced by the approach of Political Marxism (PM). In light of PM’s claim that capitalism did not emerge in France until the late nineteenth century, it draws a picture of post-revolutionary French society in which the legacy of the precapitalist Absolutist state still determined the nature of ruling class reproduction and class struggle, centered on the state apparatus (...) as the principal source of appropriation. These insights on the nature of ruling class appropriation and the centrality of the state are then applied to the case of post-Ottoman Syria, uncovering parallels with class struggles in post-revolutionary France rooted in the “Jacobin” politics of a state-dependent bourgeoisie of officials and officers. It proposes to rethink the contested moments of transition in terms of “alternative modernities” that developed in the absence of generalized capitalist relations of production. (shrink)