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A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism-Talk by Prof. Jairus Banaji, SOAS, University of London

#jairus banaji #banaji #capitalism #archivist #commercial capitalism #soas

"The articulated or chain-like structure of circulation under commercial capitalism can be viewed in at least two ways: first, in terms of the internal complexity of the 'trading machines,' how compressed or distended the chains were and their financial arrangements, and then also as vast conglomerations of commercial interests which, on a global scale, is essentially what commercial capital had come to signify by the nineteenth century. [...] New York's highly capitalized banks were able to offer 'longer credit on better terms to those interested in buying cotton.' In the winter months, 'as the crop came to market in New Orleans, cotton merchants-- who were often agents of merchant banks based in New York or Liverpool... provided advances against its eventual sale. In return for lending the factors (and thus the planters) money... these cotton merchants and their merchant-banker backers received the right to sell (the crop) on a consignment basis.' [...] American importers were able to buy sterling debt to pay for European imports once the sterling bills of exchange were sold into the interregional or international money market, and so on, to illustrate the point about diverse commercial interests being 'conglomerated' in the movement of circulation. And of course, all of these commercial interests were bound up with the desired perpetuation of slave labor."

"[...] [T]he capital invested in indigo was largely borrowed capital, and it has been possible to argue that indigo planters simply 'acted as middlemen between the cultivators and the agency and business houses in Calcutta.' The planters were essentially 'up-country merchants supported by advances from the Calcutta agency houses.' [...] Benoy Chowdhury suggested that planters preferred [the ryoti] system because it was more profitable than using hired labor, since it essentially 'involved an unpaid labor process.' As one planter put it, 'the natives will not value the labor of themselves and families at anything while working for themselves.' Peasant family labor was the productive base of most of the produce trades, and its subsumption into commercial capital through the channels of circulation described here involved the appropriation of vast amounts of unpaid family labor. Cultivators had to sign a 'properly stamped contract' at the time of the indigo advances, balances deliberately were never settled and supervision was so intense it was described as 'harassing and vexatious.' 'They say that they are required again and again to plough, to crush the clods, to remove stalks, to smooth the ground, to sow at the precise moment which the planter may dictate, until neither their time nor their labour can be called their own.' Macaulay looked upon the indigo contracts as 'of the same kind as one between a capitalist and a worker.'"

--Jairus Banaji, A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism (2020)

#banaji #the paragraph on indigo is just absolutely fascinating

#B1A4 #CNU #Shin Dongwoo #era: Rollin'#BANAJI #171210

Banaji on how Feudalism helped build towards capitalism (rather than obstructing it)

"Eastern Europe, in its own phase of backward patriarchal isolation, provides even clearer evidence. In Hungary, in the ﬁfteenth century, the peasantry was exploited predominantly in the form of money-rents and produce-rents; Pach notes that a demesne-economy as such had barely developed at this stage. Around this period, in Mecklenburg, Prussia, Bohemia, Poland and Russia feudal incomes derived, as in Hungary, mainly in the form of cash and in kind payments. The signiﬁcance of this fact is enormous. It suggests that not only did the crystallisation of feudal relations of production ﬁ nd its only true and widespread expression in the ‘second serfdom’ (i.e. the more backward eastern periphery of Europe); but the feudal estate only crystallised (i.e., acquired its developed, ‘adequate’ form) not in the relative isolation of a Europe cut off from markets and forced to depend on local production, but precisely when the estate itself assumed the character of a commodity-producing enterprise. Labour-services, Kosminsky had argued, were more strongly represented in the most populated and industrialised areas with the biggest markets. That is to say, insofar as the feudal enterprise tended to crystallise in its pure form in the earlier epoch of feudalism, the context was an expanding market. The history of the ‘second serfdom’ substantiates this point, if only because the process of crystallisation here was neither held back nor obscured by the survival of a speciﬁcally small-peasant production, and by the correspondingly more ﬂuid nature of the enterprise. As the countries of Eastern Europe were drawn into production for the emerging world-market or for an expanding domestic market (which was the case in Hungary), labour-services advanced rapidly against both earlier forms of payment. This type of exploitation was thus a later development, and it reached its maximum intensity in agricultural regions close to urban centres, (for example, the zones surrounding Moscow and St. Petersburg), or in the hinterland of the port cities and major trade-routes. The chronological distribution of labour-services shows the same pattern. In the second half of the sixteenth century – to cite only one example – as cereal-prices in the port of Danzig increased on average by some 200% over ﬁfty years under the pressure of expanding exports, the volume of labour-time mobilised from a full-sized peasant-holding on the estates increased by over 500%. Every favourable price conjuncture intensiﬁed the drive to expand the demesne at the cost of small-peasant production and to increase the volume of disposable serf labour-time both directly by imposing heavier work obligations and indirectly by a policy of cutting the size of the peasant-plot. The process of evolution of the classical manor, which the countries of the West, in particular England, had experienced in a relatively mild and impure form, was destined to be repeated at higher levels of intensity, without the same impurities, in Prussia, Denmark, Poland and Hungary; and, ﬁnally, Russia, in the period inaugurated by the ‘revolution of the world market’ in the sixteenth century. Under the impact of successive commercial booms, the European dimensions of which were already evident as early as the fourteenth century, the estates, formerly relying on produce in kind or, to a limited extent, rents in cash, converted small-peasant production into a reserve of simple reproduction: a process described by Pokrovsky as the serf owner’s leap into ‘new and more complicated forms of production’." Banaji, Jairus. Theory As History : Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation

#banaji #jairus banaji #marxism #feudalism #capitalism #economic history

Banaji on the connection between the rise of slave capitalism in the western hemisphere and the expansion of feudalism in Eastern Europe

"Marian Małowist tells us that ‘every disturbance in the delivery of grain from the coasts of the Baltic, especially from Poland, produced a rise in the cost of living in Holland and other provinces of the Low Countries . . .’. But how were the English, Dutch or Portuguese to pay for these imports? Before the export of English textiles to Portugal helped to balance England’s trade with the Baltic by sucking bullion out of Portugal, this role of payments-mechanism in the expanding grain-trade devolved partly on the export wool-trade, which required a massive drive to expropriate the domestic peasantry, and partly on the re-export of colonial produce to the feudal classes of Eastern Europe. From this, we can draw two conclusions. Firstly, the demand which sustained production in the capitalist slave-enterprises of the West Indies depended to some degree on the expansion of feudal incomes in the grain exporting zones of Eastern Europe. Secondly, these enterprises were compelled to operate within a framework of mercantilist control because colonial produce, as an element of feudal consumption, became one important means of ﬁnancing grain-imports from the feudal estates. In the seventeenth century, at any rate, the world-economy presented a vastly different picture from the industrially-dominated world-market of the nineteenth which formed the basis for the early Marxist theories of imperialism. For, at that stage, the structure of world-exchanges linked the capitalist slave-plantations of the Atlantic to feudal estates in Poland through a complicated network of basically mercantile and ﬁnancial interests centred in Amsterdam and London. Each of these enterprises ﬁtted into this structure of the world-economy as speciﬁc autonomous units of production driven by their own laws of motion. If this is evident for the slaveowners, ‘driven by motives of bourgeois production.' it now has to be established for the Polish estates."

Jairus Banaji, "Theory as History

#banaji #jairus banaji #marxism #eastern euorpe #slavery #capitalism #economic history #south america

Banaji on the damaging influence of Marxism-Leninism on the study of capitalism

"Even when the later Marxism broke with Stalinism politically, its theoretical conceptions were to a large extent still imprisoned in the deeper framework of a metaphysical-scholastic formalism, which deduced its ‘modes of production’ by forced abstraction from the simple categories present in various epochs of production. The classiﬁcation of ‘modes of production’ which came to prevail on this basis resembled nothing so much as the Periodic Table of Mendeleiev, when the discovery of the structure of the atom had yet to explain the physical basis of that Table. The simple abstractions of Stalinist history, its ‘inﬂexible social categories’, functioned in the historical process as social substances , and this Newtonian conception of history was absorbed into the later Marxism, even when it modiﬁed or rejected the established sequence of those elements. (In this sense, the ‘linear notion of historical time’ had always been a purely subsidiary characteristic of vulgar historical materialism.) In short, the naïve conception of ‘relations of production’ as forms of exploitation of labour, and the classiﬁcation of ‘modes of production’ according to the simple formal identities which this equation yielded, remained essential links of continuity between the ossiﬁed pseudo-Marxism of the Stalinists and the ‘critical’ tendencies of modern Marxism.

The persistent underlying confusion between ‘relations of production’ and therefore, in this conception, ‘modes of production’, with the different mechanisms of surplus-labour extraction became the most characteristic symptom of this continuity of problematics in the more recent debates on the ‘transition’ and on the nature of imperialist world-economy. Despite their critical character, these debates produced no breakthroughs by way of a speciﬁcally Marxist analysis either of the decline of feudalism or of colonial history."

Jairus Banaji, "Theory as History" Pissing all over Robert Brenner lol (good)

#jairus banaji #banaji #marxism #brenner #capitalism #history #economic history #marxism-leninism #stalinism #stalin

As I prepare to move on from the business of subjecting Jairus Banaji’s latest book to scrutiny, I think it’ll be useful for future me to at least record some quality second sources clustered around it.

Capital Before Large-Scale Industry is an article penned by Banaji himself which begins with an indictment of Marx for downplaying the role of law within the structuring of capitalism, an argument which crops up here and there within the book but probably most prominently in Banaji’s application of this framework to “capitalist” structures observed in the Islamic world in a chapter which has the very unfortunate title of Appendix

The Careers of Commercial Capital is a Homintern review of the book whose critique is somewhat selective, but welcome as a citation of systems that run parallel or especially, previous to, the contents of the book itself

Transition Theory is an excellent review and would qualify for this distinction on the basis alone that it explains why Banaji wrote the book at all, something that is frustratingly unclear even in its reading. There is much to love within this review (in particular, its genuine appreciation for the emphatic removal of the narrative from England and France), but what I’ll draw attention to in this blurb is the author’s pairing of this book with Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Origin of Capitalism, because these are dueling historiographies and they make the most sense in dialogue.

The debate itself would seem to have little bearing on the present, but the interest in it is not entirely localized within a study of the past--we live in an era which contains the wealthiest man in human history, a man who derives his wealth from an industry that circulates commodities.

#banaji