Re: Variations of the capitalist state

*Variations of the capitalist state: Part 2*

Thanks to Anthony Teso, Mark Baugher and Michael Meeropol for their responses. I would like to discuss some of the issues they raised and add a few more.

Anthony T. (It is hard for me to call you Tony, because here in Colombia Tony the Tiger (el tigre azucarado) is a derisive nickname for the newly elected rightwing president, Abelardo de la Espriella.) highlighted five points related to my original post. Mark elaborated on several of the points Anthony T. and I raised, and Michael followed from Mark’s post.

Let’s start by expanding on Teso’s point 5.

Unlike the modern working classes, the bourgeoisies of the 16 th through 19 th centuries could capture and use the existing premodern states for their own purposes. (In contrast, the social revolutions that occurred in the Russian Empire and in China mostly demolished the old states and built new ones.)

Anthony T. wrote,

“Describing the English and Dutch states as precapitalist empires will not survive contact with Brenner. By the seventeenth century the English state's revenues already rested on capitalist ground rent and a countryside organized by market dependence. This is relevant for Boynton's argument rather than against it: the bourgeoisie was not capturing an alien apparatus but reorganizing one whose fiscal base was already its own. The transformation was political precisely because the social property relations had already moved.”

The English and Dutch were premodern empires based on conquest of land and expansion of commercial capital. Conquest of land meant transfer or rights to tribute to either the Dutch or British State or to the Dutch East India Company, the British East India Company, or to one of the smaller variants (Plymouth Company, Viriginia Company, etc.).

The expansion of commercial capital meant that these companies were given monopoly rights to trade with (and plunder in) certain areas of the world, conquered or not yet conquered. Any would be competitors were violating the law.

Modern capitalism is based on the capitalist mode of production, i.e. the exploitation of wage labor. Commercial capitalism on the other hand could profit from ANY mode of production as long as it could buy cheap and sell dear. Modern capitalist imperialism is based on direct and indirect foreign investment and the use of imperialist state power to guarantee the “rights” of that capital to exploit people wherever it is invested.

The transformation of precapitalist flows of tribute paid in goods or labor into two streams of monetary revenue, taxes and rent, was a key element in the rise of the commercial and financial capitalist classes prior to the dominance of the capitalist mode of production and before the bourgeois revolutions.

Those two streams of revenue have continued to be a key underpinning of the modern capitalist system based on exploitation of wage labor. In modern capitalism they function to reapportion surplus value appropriated from workers by the capitalist who employ them to various other sections of the capitalist class. This occurs largely outside of the laws of the market.

The “feudal states” not only collected tribute, they maintained the armed force needed to repress challenges to the ruling classes “right” to that tribute from the plebian and peasant masses and from the ruling classes of neighboring states.

For the rising commercial and financial bourgeoisies of Europe, there was no need to destroy these states, but they did badly want to capture them to prevent them from being used against the bourgeoisie itself, or one or another of its fractions. This was the content of the bourgeois revolutions, and later of the nonrevolutionary transformations that occurred in countries like Germany and Japan.

It is important to note that the bourgeois revolutions were coincident with, and required the mobilization of, democratic revolutions of the plebian and peasant masses, BUT they were not identical with those democratic revolutions. In other words, the term “bourgeois democratic revolution” is a misnomer.

The second point to be made here is that the premodern parliaments that existed in feudal Europe were simply reformed and repurposed. Three estates, church, aristocracy and commons, were whittled down to one or two. The British clung on to their House of Lords so that they could promote willing Whigs and later Labour leaders and others of their ilk. On the other hand, the French bourgeoisie joined in the democratic fervor for a moment and helped chop aristocratic heads, to their later regret.

The younger cousins of the British bourgeoisie who resided in North America spelled out and delineated the modern division of the powers that once all resided in the court of the king into three parts. Rather than an improvised rejigging of the old institutions as had happened in Great Britain (and several different times in France), their balance of powers was consciously designed to do three things: prevent any one faction of their own class from dominating the others, keep the democratic rabble from gaining control of the state through elections, and establish a temporary monarch who was relatively, but not absolutely, autonomous from the whole ruling class.

Okay, I will address Bonapartism and Patrimonial Bonapartism more in my next installment.

Anthony Boynton


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