George C. Comninel

English feudalism and the origins of capitalism

The specific historical basis for the development of capitalism in England — and not in France — is traced to the unique structure of English manorial lordship. It is the absence from English lordship of seigneurie banale ‐ the specific political form of parcellised sovereignty that figured centrally in the development of Continental feudalism ‐ that accounts for the peculiarly ‘economic’ turn taken in the development of English class relations of surplus extraction. In France, by contrast, the distinctly ‘political’ tenor of subsequent social development can equally specifically be traced to the central role of seigneurie banale in the fundamental class relations of feudalism.

Critical Thinking and Class Analysis: Historical Materialism and Social Theory

elements of a theory of human Praxis” (A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981, 1–2), understands Marxism, and the bulk of Marx’s writing, in economic determinist terms. Melvin Rader’s Marx’s Interpretation of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979) stands out among non-Marxist approaches for asserting that Marx’s use of the base and superstructure metaphor was subsidiary to a more fundamental social paradigm of “organic totality.” 36 Socialism and Democracy

Emancipation in Marx's Early Work

This chapter focuses on the way in which Marx’s early concern with the need for both political freedom and social emancipation was transformed through his exposure to the ideas of political economy. It was Friedrich Engels—who worked at (and later inherited) his father’s cotton mill in Manchester—who first introduced Marx to these ideas, in “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”, written for the Deutsch-Franzosische Jarhbucher that Marx was editing in 1843. Although Engels first articulated a number of important ideas that he and Marx came to share—including that the contradictions of the capitalist system of production would lead to a radical social revolution—it was Marx’s critique in his 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts that situated the capitalist alienation of labour in relation to the entire historical development of property relations, and the achievement of true human emancipation in the form of communist society. This marked his definitive break with philosophy as an agency for revolutionary transformation. Instead, he recognized that the historical realization of communism as the transcendence of human alienation “finds both its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement of private property – more precisely in that of the economy”.

Historical Materialism and the Specificity of Capitalism

This chapter emphasizes the extent to which Marx’s conception of capitalist society captures its inherent and integral totality. It is in this regard that Capital (and before it the Grundrisse) reflects an approach that recalls Hegel’s method. What is crucial, however, is that the abstract, totalizing logic that exists in capitalism is not general to historical forms of class society, but is unique and specific to the capitalism social relations of production. The capitalist mode of production differs in this way, qualitatively, from all previous forms of society, both those based on class exploitation, and those in which class relations do not exist. While Marx’s references to historical societies often are grounded in fundamentally liberal conceptions, there are places in his critique of political economy where he originally draws attention to qualitative differences between capitalist and precapitalist forms of social relations. As he noted in the “Introduction” to the Grundrisse, “Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape.” In recognizing the unique character of capitalist social relations, in their totality, they can be instructively compared with comparable but significantly different social relations in precapitalist societies, improving our understanding of the history of class societies as a whole.

Socialism and democracy: the political engagements of Ellen Meiksins Wood

Abstract The untimely death of Ellen Meiksins Wood on January 14, 2016 deprived the Left of one of its most original voices. Following Meiksins Wood’s own approach to political theory, we consider her work about the contradictory relationship between capitalism and democracy, and her commitment to a political program that led beyond capitalism towards a genuinely democratic society, in the context of her life and times.

Marx and the Politics of the First International

This chapter explores Marx’s personal commitment to the politics of class struggle through his participation in the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA). The IWA was not conceived by Marx, but emerged from a meeting organized by French and English workers, who invited him to attend. Having devoted himself for more than a decade exclusively to the critique of political economy and research into capitalist economics, Marx made the IWA his immediate priority from 1864 to 1872. He was never more than just one member of its General Council, though usually called upon to write important letters and articulate political positions. While he had some success in opposing the political ideas of both Lassalle and Proudhon in the International’s early years, over the long run the organization became polarized between a majority committed to the anarchism of Bakunin and a strong insurrectionist minority inspired by the ideas of Blanqui and the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx and his supporters were few in number, though he was recognized as among the organization’s leaders. He was also politically adroit, and succeeded in establishing among the Rules that the working class needed to constitute itself as a political party, contrary to the position of the Bakuninists.

Capital and Historical Materialism

Many argue that Marx’s political project of working class revolution to realize socialism has proved a dead end. His critique of capitalism’s inherent economic dysfunctionality and profound inequalities, however, has been acknowledged even by the mainstream during the current global crisis. This disconnect reflects the belief that proletarian socialist revolution might reasonably have been expected in 1848, when Marx and Engels called for it in The Manifesto. Extending Marx’s method of historical materialist analysis to the history of class society−historical analysis that Marx did not himself pursue, relying instead on liberal historical accounts of classes−reveals that even in Western Europe capitalism was far from sufficiently developed for proletarian revolution even at the turn of the 20th century. Using the analysis provided in Capital, however, it can be seen that the society Marx understood to be the foundation for a profound revolutionary transformation does finally exist today. MARXISM 21