Maurice Dobb’s “Studies in the Development of Capitalism” is still of considerable interest because, among other things, it deals with a problem about which there is still a great deal of confusion in this country–the question of how social systems came into being, the question of emergence. For example, it is well known that the ancient historians group has been wrestling with the problem of feudal emergence out of classical slavery for a number of years, but outside of one paper, a most amazing one, completely alien to Marxism, based on the teachings of the Russian emigre historian, Rostovtzeff, rather than Marx–by John Morris, Modern Quarterly, Summer, 1948–this writer has come across nothing which would lead him to suppose that this problem has been solved, or at least was on the way to being solved.
Unfortunately, it is all too evident that our ideas concerning the development of capitalism out of feudalism is likewise clouded with doubts and hesitations, with speculation where there should be clear understanding. For this work of Maurice Dobb, as we shall see, does not fulfill the promise of its title.
Marxism teaches us that the old organism develops to its peak, its ultimate, before it gives way to the new. Marxism teaches us that the new organism which succeeds the old develops as a foetus develops within the womb, emerging when it has formed and shaped itself to the point where it has a sufficiency of strength to bite through the belly-cord uniting it to the old: to stand, somewhat shakingly, on its own feet.
Marxism also teaches us that society rests upon an economic foundation, that flowing out of direct productive relations, in relative correspondence to them, arises society’s superstructure; but not as something fixed and rigid, on the contrary, responsive, expressing man’s passion, his limitation resulting from the restrictiveness and particulateness of his practice. Inevitably then, the superstructure–the methodology through which man’s relationship to man is pronounced and regulated–exercises its profound influence on the economic foundation, aiding in its advancement, or by being hostile to it, attempting to degrade it.
Bearing these things in mind we now turn to examine those chapters of Maurice Dobb’s “Studies” which deal with the emergence of capitalism from feudalism. The task has been made somewhat easier by reason of a recent interchange of opinion between Dobb himself and the Yankee economist, Paul Sweezy– Science & Society, Spring, 1950.
Sweezy is of the opinion that the two pivotal centuries, 14th-16th, were of such a character as to be neither feudal nor capitalist, for he says: “As the foregoing statement by Dobb emphasises, feudalism in western Europe was already moribund, if not actually dead, before capitalism was born. It follows that the intervening period (14th-16th centuries, A.E.) was not a simple mixture of feudalism and capitalism: the predominant elements were neither feudal nor capitalist.” i.e., p. 150.
But what does this assertion of Dobb’s which Sweezy refers to–in order to bolster his own position, though in actuality there is no deep conflict of views, no antagonism, between the two– actually say? Dobb says: “It is true, and of outstanding importance for any proper understanding of this transition (commutation, A.E.) that the disintegration of the feudal mode of production had already reached an advanced stage before the capitalist mode of production developed, and that this disintegration did not proceed in any close relationship with the growth of the new mode of production within the womb of the old.” “Studies,” p. 20. (My emphasis.)
And yet, even while Dobb asserts this, he devotes ten packed-pages “proving” that capitalist forms of production had already made their appearance as far back as the 11th century! Pages 151-61 are crammed with “observations” and “facts” to support this hypotheses! He states: “In the Netherlands and in certain Italian cities these developments of capitalist production that we meet in Elizabethan and Stuart England are to be found already matured at a much earlier date. This appearance of capitalism is connected with the early development in Flemish towns (as early as the 12th century and even the 11th) of a roaming, landless, depressed class... In certain Flemish towns the capitalist merchant-manufacturer had already begun to make his appearance ...” and he carries on in this extravagant and completely false fashion for ten solid pages! (My emphasis.)
Where did these homeless people come from? Dobb doesn’t say, but how possibly could a homeless class come into being without history being aware of it? And where did this highly-developed merchant-capital-manufacturer disappear to! Dobb doesn’t say, it confounds history! We are fully entitled to come to some conclusions of our own, drawn from this mass of weighty “evidence.” It seems that capitalism can come into being, develop itself to a high degree–comparable to Stuart England, that is to the period immediately ante-dating the bourgeois revolution–then disappear, return to feudalism. In that case what has happened to the teachings of Marx which tells us that capitalism proclaims by its very existence the dawn of socialism! Words make sense even when thought, as is the case with Dobb, is cloudy with mystification!
What has Marx to say about this dawn of capitalist production? He is plain and explicit, he states without reserve that capitalist production appeared “... as early as the 14th or 15th century, sporadically, in certain towns of the Mediterranean, the capitalist era dates from the 16th century,” Capital, Vol. I, p.739 (my emphasis.) In other words it dates from that period when certain branches of production showed a social relationship alien to feudalism.
Are we supposed to believe that Marx, that man with the eye of an eagle, “overlooked”–as Dobb infers!–this extensive development of capitalism in the centuries Dobb speaks of? Marx was a thirsty man, thirsty for true knowledge, he never allowed mirages to lure him on. Nor can he believe that “historians” representatives of the last, dying phase of capitalism–incapable any more of producing a Gibbons, or a Mommsen– have enriched man’s knowledge of the feudal era.
It is incredible to find so-called Marxists swallowing without a vestige of reserve, with no scepticism whatsoever, the “findings” of such historians; people such as Collingwood and Myers, who tell us that coal was extensively mined in Roman Britain, “sold and hawed to the peasant villages.”
It is obvious that Dobb has allowed himself to be completely enmeshed and carried away by the methodology of the Rostovtseff school of “historical research,” a methodology which seeks to level all history to one of quantitative emergence, and which uses as embossment a terminology which distorts and vulgarises history, robs it of particulateness, makes it downright senseless. No qualitative changes, working class and capitalist class equally at “home” in ancient Rome, in mediaeval Antwerp, or in modern London. They call such clap-trap history! Fortunately, history proceeds on its way without troubling to raise its hat!
What are the simple and well-known facts regarding the emergence of capitalist production? Marx states, with the simplicity of genius, that the genesis of capitalist production received its initial impetus on the basis of “... the expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil,” then he adds: “The history of this expropriation, in different countries, assumes different aspects, and runs through its phases on different order of succession, and at different periods.” Cap. Vol. 1, p. 739. Are we not entitled on the basis of this statement of Marx, fully justified in asking Dobb to explain the relationship of the peasantry as a class to the feudal-lords of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries? Can one doubt the true answer? The relationship was feudal, based on some form of vassalage, hence capitalist production, contrary to what Dobb asserts, did not exist during the period he speaks of.
Marx concludes: “The prelude of the revolution that laid the foundation of the capitalist mode of production, was played in the last third of the 15th, and the first decade of the 16th century... The new nobility was the child of its time, for which money was the power of all powers,” i.e., p. 741-2 (my emphasis). Thus we see that the emergence of the capitalist mode of production is conditioned by, and cannot be brought into being, unless masses of people find themselves in a position where they must sell all they possess, their labour-power, to others with the capital to purchase it, to pay for its upkeep and reproduction. If Maurice Dobb had paid closer attention to this sort of reproduction and less to worrying over various phases of feudal hordes, with their reproduction and ultimate transfer into bourgeois-capital–which, incidentally, he fails to solve, utterly and completely!–he would have been better off.
Money now becomes “the power of all powers,” the task confronting it–and which it solved so successfully–lay in breaking down, nullifying, that section of the still-prevailing feudal code which interfered with its growth and expansion, and with the consolidation of its gains–for a new form of theft had to be legalised! It is this problem, the struggle between the increasingly more numerous forms of capitalist production and the restraint imposed upon them by the superstructure, which led. at one and the same time, to the most bestial and brutal oppression of the people even while the same state-power attempted to hold in some sort of check the all-consuming avarice of “money,” its total disregard for any form of law and order other than its own.
The business of the state is to keep the struggle of antagonistic classes in bounds, and this includes the necessity of “toning-down” as far as possible quarrelling groups and factions among the ruling order itself. Between peasant and feudal lord, between worker and the capitalist, exists a bottomless gulf which cannot be bridged, it forms a basic antagonism. But between propertied classes there is no such antagonism, no such absolute cleavage; there exist contradictions which can and do lead to the battlefield, but not to the extermination of property rights and relations.
Maurice Dobb is uneasily aware that something of this nature takes place, for he says–as a footnote to a number of remarkable pages on “realisation,” reminiscent, deeply so, of Keynes–“It is worth remarking that the political struggles of the late Tudor times were largely occupied with the tendency of Tudor legislature to maintain the stability of the existing rural society... to stem the further disintegration of the old property system,” p. 81, “Studies.” It is plain to see that Dobb has little understanding of the real process at work, or that the job of the state is to hold society in “check”; which means in practice that compromise after compromise is arrived at, relative to the given relationship of the contending parties. Each such compromise brings into effect some new circumstance, often unforseen by either party, which leads, sooner or later, to a further deepening of the contradiction and ultimately its resolvement through force.
Where the new mode of production was strong enough, where it found the most favourable opportunities for development– for advance is always through the particular, never through the general–it succeeded in “ignoring” the old ideology, in forcing it to retreat.
Capitalist production triumphed because it succeeded in establishing relations between propertyless people and handicraft industry, by setting this latter in motion. New ideas came into being as the result of this new relationship and these ideas came into conflict with the new landed aristocracy, whose extravagance forced their state, with the king as rally-point, to outright forms of confiscation via taxation. Until the bourgeoisie under Cromwell broke its power this class of landed aristocracy was the dominant class; reactionary and feudal in its outlook even though in itself had cut the ground from under its own order!
Engels once stated that it was possible that he and Marx were compelled to lay too much emphasis on economics, but if that was the case it seems as if we in Britain today have completed the circle, for Dobb sees the superstructure–and is he alone?–as dominating the economic base. He has this to say: “But while political constraint and the pressure of manorial custom still ruled economic relations... the form of this exploitation cannot be said to have shed its feudal form–even if this was a degenerate and rapidly disintegrating form.” Science & Society, Spring 1950 (my emphasis). But if this is so, if economic relations were still ruled by the old feudal superstructure, what caused the latter’s disintegration? What forces prepared the way for the bourgeois revolution? Whence came the ideas that shook society, like a limp rag, from top to bottom?
It Is impossible to accept this view of Dobb’s, it does not conform to reality, it cannot be substantiated by Marxist analysis. The feudal form of exploitation, as Marx clearly demonstrated, was some form or other of villienage–although it is well to remember that since feudalism itself developed out of a “marriage” between slave-society and German peasant-barbarism, peasant communities were still to be found outside the prevailing form.
Dobb himself points this out, but–like so much else in the book–seems unable to digest it. He also points out the role the barons played in creating an army of the landless, though it comes out with some reluctance and is minimised. Yet he must have read these famous words of Marx relating to this event so weighty with history: “In insolent conflict with king and parliament, the great feudal lords created an incomparitable larger proletariat by the forcible driving of the peasantry from the land, to which the latter has the same feudal rights as the lord himself,” Cap. Vol. I, p. 741. Yet, in the face of this evidence, Dobb states: “The form of this exploitation cannot be said to have shed its feudal form”–extraordinary, extraordinary indeed!
One is amazed to find how closely these ideas of Maurice Dobb resemble those of Duhring, who states: “Political conditions are the decisive cause of the economic order,” Anti-Duhring. p. 184. How sharply Engels reacted to this, saying: “If ’political conditions are the decisive cause of the economic order,’ then the modern bourgeoisie cannot have developed in struggle with feudalism, but must be the latter’s voluntarily begotten child... The struggle of the bourgeoisie against the feudal nobility is the struggle of town against country, of industry against landed property, of money economy against barter economy; and the decisive weapons of the burghers in this struggle was their economic power, constantly increasing through the development first of handicraft industry, at a latter stage progressing to manufacturing industry, and through the extension of commerce,” i.e. One cannot help wondering what Engels would have said to this statement of Dobb’s: “Fascism as a political form and an economic policy has been vanquished and as an ideology is discredited,” p. 384, “Studies.” God help us, the author of this twaddle is regarded as the best representative of the British Communist Party on the economic front! How little, alas, have we changed from those days when Engels criticised us as rank opportunists and philistines!
What is the cause of the eclecticism which runs as a sore through this book we are examining? Which in one place shows with overwhelming detail the process of primary accumulation, while in the next is puzzled with what happened to it; which at one point agrees that some form of villienage is the hall-mark of feudalism, while denying it in the next breath; which disagrees with Sweezy’s assertion that late feudalism was neither feudal nor capitalist, yet can speak of “Transitional economic and social forms composed of an unusual degree of elements from different systems,” p. 386, “Studies”?
The cause is not far to seek. Dobb separates the economic basis of society from its superstructure, fails to observe the inter-connectedness of the two, and sublates the basis as a whole to its superstructure. Ideas to Dobb are paramount, the fact that these ideas flow out of a particular mode of production, that the relationship of man to production is social, hence his ideas are subordinate, never enters his head. Out of the conflict between the old and new spring totally different and unique qualities, merchant-capital, once it came into contact with petty-production, ceased to be merchant-capital. Similar with usury, on the basis of developing bourgeois production and expanding commerce, it subordinated many of its original properties and developed others which it didn’t possess previously. These feudal hordes, about which Dobb wastes pages on pages, entered into relationship with expanding capital, and by so doing emerged as bourgeois-capital.
Maurice Dobb completely fails to see that the base is primary, that when this changes the superstructure, willy-nilly, must follow suit. But the change which takes place in the mode of production, the base, is not immediately reflected within the superstructure, it does not correspond to it in an absolute fashion, only relatively. Stalin points this out with exceptional clarity in his speech dealing with linguistics, he says: “The superstructure is not connected directly with production only indirectly, i.e. by means of economics, By means of the basis. For this reason the superstructure reflects changes in the level of development, of the productive forces, not immediately and directly, but after changes in the basis. This means that the sphere of action of the superstructure is narrow and restricted,” a far cry indeed from Dobb’s “But while political constraint and the pressure of manorial custom still ruled economic relations!” Yet Emile Burns considers this section of Dobb’s book a “great contribution to English Marxist literature.” thank God he is not a Welshman!
It is the chapter, “Between the Two Wars,” which reveals to the fullest extent just how far Maurice Dobb has departed from reality, that is to say, from Marxism, but as this writer has already gone into that chapter with considerable detail it would be a waste of time to condense it here. It is to be hoped that this paper will at least lead to a further and closer examination of this work of Dobb’s and that from it may come some good. The question of emergence teaches us where to lay emphasis, that is why Lenin said that a major strike was worth a dozen elections; for the factory, the shop, is nearer the base. How difficult it is to get people to see this.
Evans Note: The above essay was sent to the Editor of World News and Views in the early part of July 1950, it was not acknowledged. The article beneath, which deals with Maurice Dobb’s chapter. “The Period Between the Two Wars,” is a condensation of a paper sent to the Modern Quarterly in early 1948, which the Editor, Dr. John Lewis, lost. As can be seen from the letter appended below–sent to Emile Burns, Editor of Communist Review–I again attempted to get the MS on Dobb examined.