Transition Debate

The publishing of ‘Studies in the Development of Capitalism’ by Maurice Dobb in 1946 sparked off the debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It was one that led as much to the development and refinement of the Marxist historical method as it helped engender an understanding of how the capitalist mode of production first emerged.

The book was the first major work, to challenge the then orthodox explanation of the transition – the ‘Commercialization Model’. Dobb’s narrative placed in a much more central position peasant resistance and class antagonism between the lord of the manor and the direct producer (the serf).

Dobb’s study started with an understanding of feudalism that shaped the nature of his investigation into the development of capitalism. Feudalism was viewed in terms of the basic unit of production that existed in that mode of production, i.e. the serf. In his understanding, the serf is a peasant who is joined with his means of production. As a consequence the lord, in order to extract surplus-labour from the peasant, had to rely on extra-economic means to do so. In other words, a whole gamut of coercive measures – the use (or threat of use) of force, the control of jurisdiction and collection of fines accruing through that means, the imposition of fines for the transference of land, etc.– were used to collect revenue in an ‘arbitrary’ fashion. Arbitrary, that is, in relation to the ostensibly objective, contractual economic forces that decide wages in the capitalist system.

Dobb also stressed an understanding of the nature of capitalism in order to understand the transition. The dominant trend before Dobb had tended to view capitalism as an element in many historical stages, if not every one of them. Dobb traced this tendency to the insufficiently developed definitions of capitalism used by previous scholars from Weber to Sombart. His own understanding of capitalism (as “a system of production in which labour-power itself is commodified) was instrumental in his understanding of the transition. By this approach, what became important was to study the process whereby the serf of feudalism was ‘freed’ from his means of production. That is, the process by which a small body of men came to own the means of production and the concomitant creation of a class that had no option but to sell their labour-power.

It is from this vantage point that he was able to critique so radically the prevalent explanations for the transition from feudalism to capitalism. As he stated, “Men of capital (traders, merchants, bankers etc.), however acquisitive, are not enough: their capital must be used to yoke labour to the creation of surplus-value in production.” His search was for the processes by which the qualitative change in the relations between capital and labour came about. The medieval dynamic within which Dobb found the potential for this radical change in relations was class struggle and this then became the internal axis around which he traced the developments that led to the emergence of capitalism.

Dobb saw the dissolution of feudalism as the first step towards the development of capitalism. Feudalism was characterized by class antagonism between a peasant class forced to give up its surplus, and lords in constant need of an increasing proportion of surplus – an antagonism also conditioned by inherently inefficient conditions of production. This meant that in the situation of a greater need for revenue, the lord merely put more pressure on the producer, whether in the form of increased labour services or rent in cash or kind. A breaking point was rapidly reached as sub-infeudation, demographic increase in the lordly class and an increased expenditure (linked to war and the availability of luxury goods due to the creation of new prospects by trade), combined to create an unsustainable burden on the primary producer.

The resolution of this increasingly unstable state of affairs was found in a process of class struggle – various struggles of peasants as a community and as individuals, not least the entailing flight from the lords’ lands as a means of protest. The drastic reduction in population in the 1300s due to a plague and increasing food scarcity, created a series of feudal crises in the 14^th and 15^th centuries that gave the serfs a crucial bargaining tool. The scarcity of labour in this period was potentially a powerful means for serfs to improve their own condition.

In an interesting section that hinted at some of the issues that Brenner was to later pick up, Dobb explored a few of the reasons of the admittedly varied response of the lords to the situation described above. The nature of the response was, for him, dependent on the strength of peasant resistance, the development of communal cohesion within the peasantry, the strength of the lords themselves and the interest that the absolutist states identified as crucial to their own survival. He attributed prime place in the development of a trend towards commutation, however, to economic considerations. He suggested, for example, the existence of a flourishing wool trade in the northern and western parts of England, predisposed lords to money rents or in other places where customary labour services were low, the lord might have seen commutation as a method whereby he could actually get more than he had so far. By far the most important, however, was the abundance or scarcity of labour. Thus Dobb saw the 14^th century, by and large, as the time when serfdom was dismantled across Western Europe.

In Dobb’s understanding, the dismantling of feudalism was not enough to explain the rise of capitalism and this subsequent period is one of transition towards capitalism which only really emerges in the 16^th century. This period was one in which the petty mode (peasants producing commodities on a small scale) was, at least partially, freed from the constraints of the labour services and arbitrary exactions. Rents were largely extracted in money and the customary control of the lord was now changed into a freehold (or copyhold) contract.

This freeing of the petty mode led to a period wherein the various individual producers were forced to go to the market and convert their produce into commodities and compete with each other. Given that the fertility, size and other indices of productivity of the lands that peasants were able to retain varied, this led to a process of differentiation and the creation of a `kulak’ or rich peasant class. There was the simultaneous impoverishment of sections of the village peasantry that the rich peasants were able to employ on their lands and who later formed the core of the proletariat.

Dobb next examined the role of these classes in the emergence of capitalism and the process of primitive accumulation. He used the “two ways” paradigm of Marx to see an early stage wherein production is taken control of by the merchant (the second way). The putting out system (where the merchant supplies the handicrafts producer with the raw materials and markets the finished commodity) was one of the manifestations of this stage. This subordination of the process of production was replaced at a later stage when the direct producer, after increased exposure to merchant capital, was able to take control of production himself and become a merchant and capitalist (what Marx called the “really revolutionary way”). It was from this time on that the impetus towards further capitalist development was sustained.

Thus, while Dobb does point to the disintegrative function of trade on the feudal structure, he saw it as an effect that only really led to something after the internal contradictions of the feudal mode had freed the petty mode. In other words, external factors served to accentuate pre-existing internal factors.

Dobb classified this stage, based on the basic economic relations that existed, as a feudal one. The final stage in the transition was completed with the bourgeois revolutions of the 17^th and 18^th centuries after which the bourgeoisie was able to actually seize political power.

In 1950, American Marxist Paul Sweezy published a critique of Dobb’s book in the spring issue of Science and Society. Sweezy’s understanding of the transition, borrowed greatly from the work of Henri Pirenne, a non-Marxist historian of the medieval period. The Sweezy-Pirenne understanding, also called the commercialization model, was very much the established orthodoxy when Dobb’s book was first published.

Pirenne had, in his study of medieval Europe, associated the retreat of Europe into the Dark Ages and the simultaneous decline in urban life and commodity production with the end of the Mediterranean trade due to the Islamic invasions. This led to a retreat to a system of production for immediate consumption (the manorial system). With the revival of the Mediterranean trade, commodity production re-emerged along with towns, traders and a money economy. All of these elements were considered external to the feudal economy and hence their growth led to the dissolution of feudalism and the establishment of capitalism.

Sweezy too saw the defining characteristic of feudalism as a ‘system of production for use’ and by implication at least suggested that capitalism could be characterized as a system of production for exchange. For his own understanding of feudalism, he used the self-sufficient manor based on serf production for self-consumption as the basic unit. The problematic nature of such a definition can seen in the results he drew from them.

Firstly, he saw an inertia inherent in feudalism, the few points of instability (warring lords, growth of population) being incapable of leading to a change in the mode of production. Secondly, his formulation of feudalism made him assign an externality (and in many ways antagonism) to long-distance trade and large towns in the feudal context.

From this then came his first line of criticism of Dobb’s thesis – the question of the disintegration of feudalism due to internal contradictions. Sweezy examined the reasons that Dobb posited were responsible for an increased lordly demand for revenue and made an impressive case for seeing the increased extravagance of the lords in the context of the growth of international trade and not as a trend internal to feudalism. He also made a causal link between the flight of serfs from demesnes and the existence of towns as safe havens for them. These towns he, in turn, saw as a manifestation of the growth of trade.

Instead of Dobb’s explanation of the disintegration of feudalism, Sweezy also sought the ‘prime mover’ of the transition in trade. The growth of trade beyond the ‘peddling’ stage that was compatible with a feudal economy, introduced a system of production for exchange centered on towns and marketplaces. This system of production for exchange was far more profitable and rational and eventually came to be seen as such. This led to an abandonment of the feudal system of production for use – lords being more extravagant than before, peasants fleeing to the big towns and people looking to make a profit wherever they can. Similarly, he viewed the second serfdom in Eastern Europe as a function of proximity to the new economy of exchange. The further away the Eastern European peasant was from the big towns that could give him refuge, the less options he had to continued exploitation by the lord – now in fact intensified because of the lords being able to smell a profitable market to the West.

A second criticism Sweezy leveled at Dobb was his characterization of the transitionary centuries (14^th to 16^th) as feudal. While Sweezy too agreed that the development of capitalism didn’t happen merely with the dissolution of feudalism, he argued that the intervening period was not a feudal one given that serfdom (the basis of Dobb’s own definition of feudalism) was largely absent. Sweezy suggested that the period was characterized by an unstable mixture of production-relations and methods and preferred to call it one of pre-capitalist commodity production. One with elements of both feudalism and an embryonic capitalism contained within it.

Sweezy’s final criticism pertained to the “really revolutionary way”. As opposed to Dobb’s formulation of the producer rising from the ranks to accumulate enough capital and take over the process of production, Sweezy suggested that Marx’s “really revolutionary way” was more a reference to the direct producer starting out as both merchant and capitalist. As evidence for this, he pointed to the work of J. U. Nef which showed the emergence of large centralized centers of industrial production along the lines suggested.

The problems in Sweezy’s criticisms, in many ways, follow from his understanding of feudalism and capitalism. As Japanese historian Kohachiro Takahashi, in a clear and clinical dissection of the arguments of the debate suggested, the crucial aspect of a mode of production is not the existence of commodities, but the process of production of those commodities. Thus the crucial distinguishing factor between feudalism and capitalism is in the existence form of labour – serfdom in the former and wage-labour in the latter. If viewed in this way the crucial change to be studied becomes the transformation of feudal land property-serfdom (the former being the mode of exploitation and the latter the existence form of labour) to industrial capital – wage labour.

Rodney Hilton, an eminent British historian, undermined Sweezy’s position further demonstrating the weaknesses of Pirenne’s arguments – ones that Sweezy relied on heavily. He showed how the decline in commodity production pre-dated the Islamic invasions, as had the decline in the urban centers. He further showed that the Arabs in fact encouraged trade. Extending his critique of Pirenne, he demonstrated how the town was very much internal to feudalism and was, in fact, the manifestation of the desire to maximize feudal rent. John Merrington in a later study also suggested that towns, rather than being external to feudalism were in fact, “…grounded on and limited by the overall parcellisation of sovereignty…”

On the question of the disintegration of feudalism, Takahashi and Hilton both pointed out that the end of serfdom/feudalism was not co-incident with the end of labor services. The money-rent that was extracted was merely a transformed, at times more efficient, way of extracting the same surplus and is not the same as a capitalist rent. Takahashi showed how money rent was still an expression of feudal land property, i.e. how, though the form in which the rent was collected was changed, the basis for its extraction and its expression in terms of the serf’s labour time remained the same. Following from this, Takahashi rejected both Dobb and Sweezy’s identification of the 14^th century as the end of feudalism and said that the entire period up to the 16^th century was feudal.

Dobb’s reply to Sweezy’s critique argued against his suggestion that the 14^th to 16^th centuries be called a period of pre-capitalist commodity production. Sweezy’s answer to Dobb’s question as to the identity of the ruling class of the period was shown to be untenable by Christopher Hill, a historian who had done seminal work on the English Revolution. The proposed existence of numerous ruling classes based on numerous property-relations, Hill showed, was an unstable condition and seen only in war-like conditions.

Takahashi made another illuminating contribution to the debate in his analysis of the “two ways” paradigm. Takahashi suggested that Sweezy’s identification of large centers of industrial-type production based on Nef’s work was flawed in that what it saw as centralized production was actually an agglomeration of various putting-out units. Thus the idea that there was no transformation of the petty mode and that the producer started out as merchant and capitalist, was flawed. Simultaneously he pointed out the error in Dobb in drawing a picture of merchant control of production giving way to the direct producer becoming a capitalist. The failure to see the contradiction between the former and the latter, he says, stems from an inability to clearly demarcate the domestic system from the putting out system. It was through the former that most of Western Europe was able to accumulate the capital required for industrialization. In countries like Germany and Japan, however, in the absence of a free peasantry, capitalism emerged through the second way, that is by a transformation of merchant capital into industrial capital.

While all these objections clarified a number of historical and historiographical issues, Ellen Meiksins Wood, in her recent work entitled ‘The Origin of Capitalism’, has pointed to a more fundamental historiographical flaw in the work of Sweezy and the Commercialization theorists.

Wood pointed out that an underlying current in all their work is that the basic rationality of the market has not changed over the centuries; it had only been impeded by politico-socio-legal constraints. With such a view, all that needed explaining for the emergence of capitalism as a system, was the liberation of the market from these constraints – this would release natural impulses towards, among other things, a constant search for means to improve productivity in order to cut costs and maximize profit. In other words, once the market and the concomitant drive towards profit maximization crossed a certain critical point, capitalism was reached. All that was needed was a quantitative change.

This, she pointed out, obscured the unique forces and logic of operation of a capitalist market and, in the final analysis, amounted to a marked teleological bias. That such a treatment of the market is ahistorical emerged from Polanyi’s study of the market in preceding social formations where relationships like reciprocity and redistribution informed the trading process. Also, at a more theoretical level, Wood showed how the market in capitalism is unique in that it is for the first time in history, an imperative. It is in fact the only formation under which the market dictates that the drive for profit be a never-ending one and this provides the compulsion for a sustained development of technique and increase in productivity. The emergence of capitalism thus represented not a quantitative change as much as a qualitative change.

Thus it is not all systems of exchange that engender a sustained drive towards more and more efficiency and growth, but only a capitalist one. In other words, only after the establishment of capitalist relations, can such a market exist. Sweezy’s argument, by assuming exactly such a market, became a circular one – one that assumed the very thing that had to be demonstrated. Wood pointed out that Dobb too had not escaped this anachronistic understanding of the market, and his thesis of class struggle liberating the petty mode which improved under impetus from the market, also had an implicit circularity that qualified her acceptance of it.

It is only in the later work of Robert Brenner, that Wood saw a resolution of this circularity, wherein, class struggle itself created capitalist relations, which in turn sustained themselves on the basis of market imperatives.

Brenner’s work emerged out of a critique of the demographic explanations of the transition. The central figures of this line of thought were M.M. Postan and Le Roy Ladurie. In their work, the key to the explanation for the transition was to be found in the operation of Malthusian cycles of population growth and reduction. These cycles consisted of two phases. In the first phase, there was a situation of growing population until population outstripped the capacity of resources to provide for it. This set into operation a self-correcting mechanism that reduced the population and creates conditions of low population. This cycle of population-production disproportion or motion biseculaire is at the heart of the demographic explanation.

The demographic model (also called the neo-Malthusian model) saw the first phase of the cycle as one of high population and, consequently, by virtue of competition amongst the serfs for possession of lands, high rent and low income, i.e. a situation in which the lord’s position vis-à-vis the serf, is strengthened. With the turn of the cycle, the positions were reversed, and the serf was able to, in a situation of scarce labour, win for himself freedoms, lower rents and higher income.

Following from this line of thought, the period of growing population in Europe in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, was seen by Postan (The Medieval Economy and Society) as one in which the lords were able to maintain a tight grip on the peasants. With the advent of the Malthusian crises of the 14^th century, however, the lord, in the face of scarce peasant labour, was forced to give up freedoms and lower rents. This amounted to a virtual dismantling of serfdom. Ladurie (The Peasants of Languedoc) continued the analysis into the 15^th, 16^th and 17^th century, showing how population growth led to a fragmentation of holdings in France in the period of rising population of the 15^th and 16^th centuries. This, in turn, held back the development in France towards capitalist agriculture.

Brenner’s criticism of the demographic model was one that underlined the inadequacies in their explanation of the forces that propelled the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Brenner accepted the existence of the two-phase cycle and, indeed, agreed that the demographic explanation, taken within itself, was one that had a coherent internal logic. However, he also showed, through a comparative analysis of the different trajectories taken by Eastern Europe and Western Europe and by England and France, that the emphasis on population-production disproportion cycles could not account for the paths of development taken by these countries. Thus he concluded that these couldn’t be assigned the status of the key variable (or perhaps the prime mover of the Dobb-Sweezy debate). He then proceeded to look for the key variable and found it in the nature of the relations of production (what he terms the “surplus-extraction relations”).

Brenner’s basic argument was that ‘objective’ factors such as trade and population cycles could only operate within the parameters set by pre-existing class configurations. These in turn tended to reproduce or transform themselves by means largely internal to themselves, i.e. by class struggle. Thus, it is only by reference to and by the study of these relations that one can arrive at an understanding of the transition. So that, if you like, while population cycles and trade did play a role in the process, they only had a given effect because of the class conflicts within which they emerge.

Benner’s analysis too then starts with a particular understanding of feudalism. Crucial to his understanding was the fact of extra-economic extraction of surplus due to the joining of the producer with his means of production. Brenner was from this able to show that the reason for the periodic population-production disproportions was not some natural trans-historical juggernaut that was once again exercising its effects, rather, it was the outcome of the way in which feudal production was organized. The lord would extract surplus from the peasant through labour services as well as other ‘arbitrary’ extractions. This tended to leave the peasant with insufficient surplus to improve (even in the face of this extreme coercion). The lord also did not have any need to move towards improving the production process itself as colonization of new land, purchase of new lands, infighting and, most commonly, squeezing of increasing amounts of labour were far easier ways of increasing revenue. In such a situation, a rising population would indeed tend to lead to a demographic crisis, not one that was ‘natural’, but one that was ‘built into’ the system.

Another important trend within feudal society that Brenner explored was that of ‘political accumulation’. Brenner, continued the line of analysis suggested by the various means that the lords had open to them for augmenting their income. The limited availability of land (for purchase or colonization) meant that the lords would more commonly have to take recourse to the last two lines of action, i.e., redistribution of wealth through internecine warfare or forcing out more surplus from peasants. This often meant acquiring more vassals and forging alliances between lords for better defense. A hesitant directionality towards greater organization between the lords – a tendency towards the formation of feudal states – is suggested. Political accumulation meant not just that lords could coalesce around a powerful lord and arrange for better defense of their own demesnes but also that they were in possession of stronger tools to extract surplus from their own serfs. In this way Brenner showed that relationships that are ostensibly non-economic, in pre-capitalist contexts, are actually germane to the process of surplus extraction and utilization.

Another theoretical deficiency Brenner found in the demographic model was the assumption that there was an automatic self-correction built into the system. Brenner pointed out that in the face of increasing political accumulation, once demographic crises occurred and the revenue of the lords (a function of the number of peasants working for him) fell, they were, at least potentially, able to apply greater coercion in order to maintain their revenue or resort to more warfare, this would worsen the crisis. Brenner saw evidence of just such a process in the delayed recovery of European production levels well after the end of the demographic crisis of the 14^th century.

Having laid a conceptual framework, Brenner proceeded to show the ways in which his own understanding of the developments in medieval Europe was superior to that of the demographic model. He first studied the different trajectories of Eastern and Western Europe in the 14^th century under the pressure of demographic crisis. In most of Western Europe, the period was associated with a dismantling of serfdom, and the winning of many peasant freedoms while Eastern Europe saw the reapplication of lordly power, a fall back towards peasant unfreedoms and a ‘second serfdom’. Thus, in the face of a given demographic trend (low population) two parts of Europe saw almost opposite results. Brenner refused to accord the absence of towns in Easter Europe the status of the crucial determinant in the reapplication of serfdom. This, he said, was because of the highly suspect role of towns as supporters of peasant resistance or encouragers of peasant flight. He also rejected the explanation that the market for grain in Western Europe was the required incentive to the lords to assert their powers. He showed that rather than the second serfdom being caused by the existence of a grain market, the lords were only able to take advantage of the grain market because the second serfdom has occurred.

The second serfdom was, in his view, an effect of the lords’ need to maintain/increase income in a period of declining population. Following the feudal logic, the lords (as they did in Western Europe) tried to increase production by squeezing the serf. The reason why they were able to succeed in doing so in the East was due to the fact that they were able to find new ways of organizing themselves, and also because the peasant community as a whole was a weak entity in Eastern Europe and unable to resist the re-imposition of serfdom. This weakness stemmed from the organization of the peasant plots which, through their consolidated and ‘rational’ arrangement (since Eastern Europe was basically settled/colonized later than Western Europe and agriculture was not a spontaneous development). The arrangement tended to obviate the need for negotiation and mediation of everyday conflict and activity that was caused by fragmented and scattered arrangement of landholdings. The processes of cooperation and compromise that formed the very basis of the cohesion of the peasant community in Western Europe, was markedly absent in Easter Europe. Thus the Western European peasants were able to win freedoms even in the face of lordly attempts to assert their traditional dominance while the eastern European serfs were unable to do so.

A second major comparative study is made in the subsequent period between England and France. England between the 15^th and 17^th centuries was able to move towards the consolidation of holdings and improvement in agriculture that culminated in it being able to transcend the Malthusian cycles and reach a stage of self-sustaining growth. In France, however, in the same period, holdings were fragmented and productivity could not be increased as a result of which, it experienced another feudal crisis in the 16^th century.

Brenner argued that the reason for this divergence in the conditions under which the peasants were able to win their freedoms in the 14^th century in the respective countries. Brenner found that in France, the peasants were able to win much greater freedom and hence largely acquired individual ownership of their own land and even the lords’ ability to claim lands abandoned by peasants was compromised. The crucial determinant here, according to Brenner, was the evolution of the absolutist state in France as a ‘class-like’ competitor of the feudal lords. The state, in its attempts to secure its own status, saw the free-peasantry as a source of taxes. It thus emerged as a champion of the rights of peasants – preventing the taking over of abandoned holdings. It sided with the peasants (against the lords) in judicial policy. Correlatively, it attempted to increase its own share of revenue by increasing the tax burden on the peasant and opposed the lords’ right to collect revenue.

In England, on the other hand, the state, from its inception, had sustained itself on the basis of cooperation with the feudal ruling classes. The nature of the Norman Conquest itself laid the seeds of more integrated relations between the state and the aristocracy. The state here developed if the power of the lords was more developed. This partnership of the state and the aristocracy meant that the imposition fines and levies were left to the jurisdiction of the lords. As a result, lords were able to retain their rights to increase entry fines as also to incorporate abandoned lands into their own holdings. These were used as powerful tools by the lords in order to engross, i.e., consolidate holdings into their own hands. Brenner cited the fact that in England, the lords were able to engross almost 75 per cent of the total land by the 17^th century while the figure in France at the same time, was 45-50 per cent. Having done this, lords were able to put their holdings out in the tenant market.

This laid the ground for the emergence of the classic landlord-capitalist tenant-wage labourer trinity in England. Within the context of these relations, both the landlord and the capitalist tenant were pushed to improve productivity. The former, looking for the best deal in the presence of competing lords, would tend to offer the most attractive conditions in order to acquire tenants. The latter, looking to get a lease ahead of competing tenants, would try to make profits in highest possible rent conditions. Thus it was the two-sided resolution of class conflict – the peasant able to win freedom but the lord still able to exercise considerable power – that led to the creation of a self-sustaining economy in England. So that while class struggle in the east was worked out decisively in favour of the lord and class struggle in France worked itself out in the favour of peasant proprietorship, an intermediate resolution was seen in England which made it unique. With the rapid improvement, productivity in England was increased as it became increasingly feasible to apply better methods of agriculture. The fact that the agriculture was able to support almost 40-50% increases in the populations of towns is testament to the success of English agriculture.

It was only with the ability to transcend the demographic disasters that industrial development could commence unhampered. With increasing productivity, grain prices could stabilize and a home market could be created for cheap manufactured goods. Simultaneously, a process of proletarianisation was also set into motion that created the embryo of the industrial work force. It was this sort of self-sustaining growth that separated England from other competitors (most notably Holland) that were unable to reach self-sufficiency.

Postan, Hatcher and Ladurie in reply to Brenner’s thesis sought to correct alleged misrepresentations of their own ideas, claiming a closer adherence to the ideas of Ricardo than of Malthus and also disputing the elasticity of extractable rent that Brenner seemed to assume when talking of the lords’ sources of revenue. Guy Bois, a Marxist critic, asserted that Brenner had not separated the economic from his own “political” understanding of the transition and had thus neglected objective forces. However, his expansion on the idea, following from Marx, that they wasn’t a separation of the economic from the political in feudalism, does seem to be a powerful tool for the understanding of pre-capitalist societies.

More recent criticisms have come from Chris Harman. He accused Brenner of having assigned too much importance to the relations of productions and tried to show that it was in fact the prior development of the forces of production that served to alter the relationships. In his own account, he accorded more importance to the role of the city and merchants in the transition to capitalism while avoiding some of the pitfalls that Sweezy fell into. To a certain extent the criticism that Brenner’s account didn’t seek to incorporate the technical achievements of the period is valid. Nor indeed did he try to situate the merchant and systems like the putting-out system (one which could be said to represent at least a partial subsumption of production to capital) and the potential for development that lie therein, a point made by both Alex Callinicos and Ellen Wood.

Brenner’s development of the debate on the transition represented the forging of new conceptual tools to analyze how societies develop. In many ways it completed the study that the original transition debate set out to do. In an interesting paragraph, Wood saw how Brenner’s work in most aspects was a development of Dobb’s thesis. Yet she also pointed to the debt that he owed to Sweezy. His work did in many ways start out from an acceptance of the tenacity and internal coherence of feudalism, an assumption shared by Sweezy. Again his avoidance of a petty mode that gravitates naturally towards capitalist relations drew from Sweezy’s formulation of there being no clash of modes that was resolved in the favour of one.

The great success of Brenner lies however in successfully illuminating the motive force in the transition to capitalism. His analysis of the process of class struggle in the feudal mode and demonstration of how it led to capitalism is liberating in its avoidance of any sort of teleological bias and opens up fertile new avenues of intellectual enquiry.

[5,725 words]

Bibliography

Maurice Dobb Studies in the Development of Capitalism

Rodney Hilton (ed.) The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism

Ashton and Philpin (eds.) The Brenner Debate

Leo Huberman Man’s Worldly Goods

Ellen Meiksins Wood The Origin of Capitalism

Chris Harman From Feudalism to Capitalism (in International Socialism 45)

Alex Callinicos Theory and Narrative