Theory As History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation

Historical Materialism #25

by Jairus Banaji

The essays collected herein deal with the Marxist notion of a "mode of production," the emergence of medieval relations of production, the origins of capitalism, the dichotomy between free and unfree labor, and essays in agrarian history. They demonstrate the importance of reintegrating theory with history and of bringing history back into historical materialism.

Genres: History, Economics, Politics, Theory, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Classics

408 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Jairus Banaji spent most of his academic life at Oxford. He has been a Research Associate in the Department of Development Studies, SOAS, University of London, for the past several years. Banaji's main research interests have included: agrarian history; Late Antiquity and early Islam; historical materialism; Marx's method in Capital; the fate of the peasantry under capitalism; and, unions and industrial relations in India.

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like a more anal retentive perry anderson. That's to say really good

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I do not always agree with Banaji, particularly of his dismissal of the English agrarian capital thesis and the Brenner/Woods reading as an "orthodoxy," his discussions of Egypt, the late medieval Islamic trade development, the problems with the "Asiatic modes of production" and "tributary mode of production" as well as historical blind spots in general Marxist, and, ironically given their third world focus, specifically Maoist misreadings of past. Banaji's strength is his knowledge of periods before capitalism and the complications of "transitions," and he is particularly convincing in contrasting Mexico with Egypt in the 19th and 20th centuries. I do think, however, that Banaji focuses intensely on moods of production but is deliberately somewhat loose with what counts as capitalism outright, and his criterion seemed a little vaguer than that of Woods/Brenner.

Parts of this book seem clearly targeted at the Maoist argument that "survivals of pre-capitalist relations of production" mean that the prime revolutionary class is the peasantry against the assertions of earlier Stalinists and other forms of communism about the working class. Banaji, as Mike MacNair already has said in his review of the book, "argues that the whole ‘traditional Marxist’ scheme of differences between modes of production which are defined by the mode of exploitation - slavery in classical antiquity, serfdom under feudalism, wage labour under capitalism - is to be rejected." Banaji does this because there are proto-capitalist elements and profound misunderstanding of Asian and late antique economies in most Marxist schemas, and that the schema is both too theoretically simple. This argument is the thread that keeps these otherwise unrelated scholarly essays together. I also think that Banaji's looser definition of capitalism frustrates all kinds of other Marxists particularly when looking at over-generalizations in other modes of production.

Interestingly, while there is no "pure" agrarian capitalism according to Banaji, he does prove that there was significant wage labor in both pre-modern and third world agriculture earlier than most Marxists conceive. This is significant as it draws out the horizon of the origins out beyond England. However, where I disagree with Banaji is that wage-relationships and focus on reinvestment did NOT characterize Mediterranean interface of Catholic Christendom, Byzantium and the Dar al-Islam. Banaji does prove that Brenner/Woods may have been under-stating the development of elements of capital, but he his only focusing on one part of Brenner/Woods two part definition. That said, this does complicate the development of capitalism quite clearly.

Furthermore, Banaji seems to reject teleologies as such. He seems to conflate the ideas that = that capital developmental would have a purposive and long-run developments that were emergent from their own logic, and would have a systemic teleological pattern to the idea of a teleology of history itself. To my mind, this is reading Hegelian and German idealist assumptions about what a teleology is back into the entirety of history. This means that Banaji seems to reject a clear emergence point for capitalism and a developmental logic, partly because of Marx's "Here be Dragons" elements of Asiatic production.

This is not to dismiss Banaji. This is an important book, and while not necessarily easy for lay-readers in either medieval economic history or inter-Marxist debates, it is a vital read. It also calls for Marxists to look at non-European societies and do more significant comparative work before making big claims about history. The strongest chapters are the ones dealing with conceptions of "free" and "unfree" labor in the modern political economy as well as ones critiquing a lack of historiography in Marxist circles around antiquity and around non-European developmental modes.

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to say that this book is the single most inspiring piece of historical materialist theory that I have ever read since reading Marx's own "18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte." Banaji reinvigorates historical materialist theory by injecting it with the most thorough understanding of global history that I have seen. He analyzes China, India, Russia, Byzantium, medieval Europe, and even the cultural influences and biases that Marx and many of his first Western followers held. Banaji's description of the "tributary mode of production" is penetrating and thoroughly evidenced and his call for historians to use historical materialism to try to find the "complex trajectories" of a society is good advice for explicitly Marxist and non-Marxist historians alike.

I also quite enjoyed his chapter on the cultural conceptions of "free" and "unfree" labor in the modern West.

[Harry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Made me feel stupid in a good way. Particularly useful on the need to complexify thinking around ‘wage-labour’ over history and more simplistic Marxist historical accounts

[Sigrid · Rating 5 out of 5]

The essays in Theory as History cover an incredible amount of ground, and I don't have the knowledge that would be needed to test Banaji's nuanced arguments about the structure of the late-antique Egyptian economy or the myriad labor-forms that emerged in the Europe as the precision of Roman law gradually disintegrated. That said, the author's general line of inquiry is revitalizing and inspiring; this is the kind of book that I've always wanted to read— that I've always wished more marxists would try to write.

Here's why: Banaji is basically correct to argue that historical materialism has thus far produced nothing resembling a materialist conception of history. Drawing on Trotsky, Banaji commits to the idea that "Stalinism"—following the positivist errors of the 2nd Intl.—replaced specifically materialist history with "a theory of history ‘in general’", and that "this rubber-stamp conception of history [was accessible] only to the procedures of verification".

You don't have to agree with everything Trotsky said in order to see the BS in this linear, 'rubber-stamp' notion of history--a notion which dovetails with the idea that there is only one universal historical path to communism. This conception reduces all non-european history to a kind of half-life, legible only in relief against 'the place where capitalism first emerged'. It has limited revolutionary prospects for millions of people around the world, and continues to alienate the masses from a marxism which is all-too-easily cast as eurocentric. Theory as History lays the groundwork for a mode of inquiry that could finally lead us out of this quagmire.

...

Banaji couldn't undertake this task without starting at the beginning: "[Marx] never left us with a developed or mature theory of modes of production, and a whole strand of his thinking on these issues can easily be mobilised to support the sort of equations" which rely on seemingly obvious or superficial positivist associations. In the particular engagement with the historian Christopher Wickham, where this passage is drawn from, Banaji is concerned with a kind of thinking wherein the presence of slavery evidences a 'slave mode of production' or serfdom proves the predominance of a 'feudal mode'. I won't reproduce the argument here, but I will say that he convincingly shows that both 'modes' were typified by a wide variety of co-existing forms of labor, and that one did not simply replace the other in a natural evolutionary development—and even less so in some kind of revolutionary upheaval.

The broader point for us is that as soon as one indulges this kind of one-to-one formalism between labor processes and modes of production, one has already thrown historical specificity and complexity out the window. A person operating under this tendency could easily misdiagnose 'new world' plantation slavery as 'feudal' (because of the centrality of bonded labor), or cast contemporary India as 'semi-feudal' because of the predominance of formal (vs. real) subsumption (i.e., the continued capitalist reliance on domestic production in many industries). In either case, one would immediately be implicated in the linear thinking which proposes that capitalism's 'incomplete' development is a problem that needs to be solved before any form of communist revolution can be put on the table. With regard to these examples, Banaji shows that feudal appearances mask capitalist realities—and that 'peripheral' 'forms' of capitalism must be just as central to our understanding as the 'forms' that developed within early modern europe.

...

If there is something missing in our received understanding of Marx's 'modes of production', it has a lot to do with the fact that, "Since most of Capital was left unfinished, we do not have a proper or complete description of the interaction of 'many capitals', the most dynamic part of the system, and we tend to reduce the model to his description of individual capital in Volume One, which is one of its most abstract moments!"

Because of this focus on (let's be real, the first three chapters) of volume one, we are all too likely to miss the fact that "'relations of production'... are just not reducible to to the relations of exploitation." Banaji continues: "Clearly, by the capitalist mode of production, Marx meant more than the domination or widespread use of wage-labour, he meant the *laws of motion* that are summed up in the accumulation and competition of capitals."

For these reasons and those already discussed, we cannot equate the capitalist mode of production with the idealized direct production process, wherein a 'free' laborer sells his labor power in exchange for a wage paid in cash. This is not only because individual capitalists are all too happy to rely on the labor of the enslaved, the hyper-indebted, those bound to the land, etc., whenever it is convenient for them to do so. It is also, as Banaji argues in chapter 5, because free labor itself is only a fiction—or we might say an ideal or conceptual necessity with more or less ironic 'real' instantiations. I'm usually very skeptical of arguments which elide the fundamental differences between the experiences of 'free' workers and those of workers who have been enslaved, but I can't say that I disagree with the way Banaji lays things out. I think some of the arguments would read differently if he was not so obviously concerned with historical specificity and so deeply critical of false universality.

Despite the fictional status of the free laborer, Banaji submits that we should retain the image of the direct production process because "the mobility of labor is essential to the mechanism of capital [at the level of "total social capital"]"—even if it is not at all essential on the level of the individualist capitalist enterprise. And it's this kind of nuance which probably caused one of the blurb-writers to refer to Banaji's approach as "seemingly idiosyncratic". Many of the more complex points in this book require the reader to hold two or more 'levels' of abstraction in their heads at the same time. That's something which Marx always asked us to do as well, but it's a challenge for those who might be used to the kind of formalism that Banaji argues against, which relies on identity or symmetry between levels of abstraction (if it admits the existence of the latter at all).

At points, I was left wondering if the very concept of the 'mode of production' would get lost in movement between these levels— or if, in the end, there remained any real use for 'epochs of history' (let alone 'laws of motion') in the hismat being developed here. I'm not sure if that's a worthy criticism of the text or an indictment of my own reasoning capabilities. My reading partner also pointed out that the very concept of a mode of production might only apply to capitalism—that other modes were simply too discontinuous to admit true 'laws of motion'. That discussion is too broad for this review, but points were made. I felt it was worth mentioning here even though I don't feel like going into detail.

...

Whatever we make of the work that still needs to be done, Theory as History is extremely helpful in de-centering a particular kind of labor and a particular (european) model of capitalism's emergence, which 'writes the history of capitalism as though it were history of the first capitalist country'. It is also full of fascinating insights regarding the movements and 'transitions' between what we might still refer to as non-capitalist modes of production, and the ways in which typically capitalist forms (including wage-labor with strong proletarian characteristics) appear whenever production starts to orient itself toward a world-market. The intro suggests that Theory as History is just a prologue for the book he wanted to write—his newer Brief History of Commercial Capitalism—and I can't wait to read that one too.

[Chelsea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brimming with insights, this collection shows Banaji as one of the few contemporary Marxists who does their due diligence of historiography. There are *hundreds* of references deployed to enrich the materialist account of pre-capitalist forms of production and class dynamics in late antiquity in e.g. the dynastic Chinese empires and Mughal India, presaging the full-fledged emergence of capitalism. The breadth and depth of such an analytically rigorous and concise work is breathtaking, and allows Banaji to restore historical specificity to...historical materialism. Anyone who wants to understand the real developments of modern history should not miss this.

[Durakov · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wouldn't call Benaji a flashy writer. Stylistically, I think it's fair to say that a good deal of the writing is not even very good. But, goddamn, this man is smart! How can one balance this much information? I truly don't understand this guy!

Benaji seems to believe that no abstraction deserves the right to live without proving itself in the battleground of archival research. This is a remarkable synthesis and has forever complicated my understanding of "mode of production," "formal and real subsumption," "mode of exploitation," and a lot more. It had a mostly negative effect on me (though very much positive in terms of edification!), by which I mean it did irreparable damage to my favorite historical generalizations. I was dazzled.

[Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

More rewarding than frustrating ... but only slightly. I suspect that if Banaji held himself to the same standards as he holds everyone else, he would have much, much less to write about.

[Differengenera · Rating 5 out of 5]

just a profoundly impressive collection of essays that actually follow through on the pledge to introduce historical specificity to Marx's method, i.e. steadily construct via a set of simple abstractions a comprehensive picture of a set of social relations at a particular place and time; should really have everyone thinking very carefully before throwing terms like transition or semi-feudal around.

I happened to be reading Lukács before I went onto this and there are sections in History and Class Consciousness ,as well as polemics he wrote subsequently, where he explicitly cautions against the projection of Marx's categories either into other fields, or to human societies before the nineteenth century on the basis that this would amount to mere sociology rather than a revolutionary method for getting a handle on where the working class are wrt seizing power, which is actually quite sad considering whenever anyone mentions Lukács its in the context of radical literary criticism rather than putting a much more elegant shape on Leninism.

Lukács would say that capitalism in modernity is a distinct totality consonant with the capacity of the proletariat to develop a consciousness of itself towards its own emancipation, and I suppose the question I'm left with here is what the nature and horizon of class struggle was in, e.g. contexts in which Merovingians were leveraging late-Roman law in anticipating modern forms of rationalised concentration of production. this is probably exactly the kind of Hegelian nonsense Banaji has set himself against, it's not as though the specificity of industrial capitalism ever stopped Marx from talking about wage labour in early modernity, but I'm still curious.

he really is just so vicious in pointing out the failings of other historians in taking adequate stock of the primary sources

[L. A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting although I think banaji's partisans (and often the book itself) seem to overstate the clarity and decisiveness of its conclusions. For 75% of the book or so its mostly a study of different organizations of labor outside 16th-18th century england, either in european colonies in the 18th-20th centuries or european/Mediterranean antiquity or the middle ages. I thought they were actually very interesting but some of the conclusions arrived at in the text (such as concluding that similar arrangements of worker housing in late egyptian antiquity to 19th century egypt means that broad social production is organized in meaningfully the same way) seem overambitious almost to the point of absurdity.

The last 25% is where the arguments about "transitions to capitalism" take place, and these are much more measured, but are less conclusive in their contents than i expected given the authors reputation. It was hard to say whether the argument is one of continuity to historically "prior" forms of social organization of production, or that capital subsumes labor unevenly and in historically contingent ways even as a globalized colonial/market process, or some combination of these.

Overall very interesting, i will probably look more into banajis later work to see how these arguments develop at some later time.

[Jon · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a phrase, Theory As History is an interesting place to start from for Barnaji, I think. As a book of historiography I found it quite fascinating, but as a book of theory I found it extremely wanting.

Instead of a historically derived social formation, Barnaji seems to see capitalism everywhere he looks; perhaps it takes the form a timeless method or formula, or even structure. Of those, it's really hard to tell because the only definition h seems willing to give is "it is accumulation or the 'drive for surplus value' that defines capitalism." But if that is your definition, then there's no question what you'll find.

According to Michael Hudson money and interest-bearing debt were invented several thousand years ago (and so too debt bondage), and clearly some form of surplus value accumulation started far before the start of recorded history. Perhaps there has always been capitalism. But then again if you see it everywhere, what's the difference from seeing it nowhere?

[Oli Vert · Rating 5 out of 5]

i lik this buk

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

A necessary read for any Marxist to grapple with.

[Jackson Purdie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Convincing in some ways , especially with regards to formal subsumption and forms of exploitation under pre Capitalism.